Not Exactly Rocket Science

Bilingual children learn language rules more efficiently than monolinguals

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:00:49 -0500

As Eddie Izzard notes in the video above, the English, within our cosy, post-imperialist, monolingual culture, often have trouble coping with the idea of two languages or more jostling about for space in the same head. "No one can live at that speed!" he suggests. And yet, bilingual children seem to cope just fine. In fact, they pick up their dual tongues at the same pace as monolingual children attain theirs, despite having to cope with two sets of grammar and vocabulary. At around 12 months, both groups produce their first words and after another six months, they know around 50.

Italian psychologists Agnes Melinda Kovacs and Jacques Mehler have found that part of their skill lies in being more flexible learners than their monolingual peers. Their exposure to two languages at an early point in their lives trains them to extract patterns from multiple sources of information.

Kovacs and Mehler demonstrated that by sitting a group of year-old infants in front of a computer screen and playing them a three-syllable word. The infants could use the word's structure to divine where a cuddly toy would appear on the screen - if the first and last syllables were the same ("lo-vu-lo"), it would show up on the right, but if the first and second syllables matched ("lo-lo-vu"), it appeared on the left. By watching where they were looking, the duo could tell if they were successfully predicting the toy's position.

Success depended on learning two separate linguistic structures over the course of the experiment. The infants had to discern the difference between 'AAB' words and 'ABA' words and linking them to one of the two possible toy locations. After 36 trials where they got to grips with the concept, Kovacs and Mehler tested the infants with eight different words.

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How the turtle got its shell through skeletal shifts and muscular origami

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:00:57 -0500

The turtle's shell provides it with a formidable defence and one that is unique in the animal world. No other animal has a structure quite like it, and the bizarre nature of the turtle's anatomy also applies to the skeleton and muscles lying inside its bony armour.

The shell itself is made from broadened and flattened ribs, fused to parts of the turtle's backbone (so that unlike in cartoons, you couldn't pull a turtle out of its shell). The shoulder blades sit underneath this bony case, effectively lying within the turtle's ribcage. In all other back-boned animals, whose shoulder blades sit outside their ribs (think of your own back for a start). The turtle's torso muscles are even more bizarrely arranged.

This body plan - and particularly the odd location of the shoulder blades - is so radically different to that of all other back-boned animals that biologists have struggled to explain how it could have arisen gradually from the standard model, or what the intermediate ancestors might have looked like. Enter Hiroshi Nagashima from the RIKEN Center; he has found some answers by studying how the embryos of the Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) shift from the standard body plan of other vertebrates to the bizarre configuration of adult turtles.

By comparing the embryos to those of mice and chickens, Nagashima showed that all three species start off with a shared pattern that their last common ancestor probably shared. It is only later that the turtle does something different, starting of a sequence of muscular origami that distorts its body design into the adult version.

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Ebola found in pigs (thankfully, it's the one harmless type)

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:00:38 -0500

As the world is now painfully aware, pigs can act as reservoirs for viruses that have the potential to jump into humans, triggering mass epidemics. Influenza is one such virus, but a group of Texan scientists have found another example in domestic Philippine pigs, and its one that's simultaneously more and less worrying - ebola.

There are five species of ebolaviruses and among them, only one - the so-called Reston ebolavirus - doesn't cause disease in humans. By fortuitous coincidence, this is also the species that Roger Barrette and colleagues have found among Philippine pigs and even among a few pig farmers.

The team were called in last July by the Philippine Department of Agriculture to identify a mystery illness that was sweeping across the country's pigs, infecting their lungs and airways and causing miscarriages. Barrette's group collected tissue samples from five groups of pigs throughout the island and through a battery of tests, they gradually ruled out their list of potential candidates - foot-and-mouth disease, African swine fever, and others.

The first positive hit was an infection known as blue ear disease, or to give it its formal name - porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV). It was already the primary suspect for the pig illness, and the Philippine strain was genetically similar to one that was sweeping through China at the time. It seemed like the mystery was solved. But not so - when Barrette incubated an infected lymph node with monkey cells that are immune to PRRSV, the cells still started dying. There was another virus.

To identify it, Barrette used a powerful tool called a "panviral microarray" - a small slide that contains the genetic signatures of tens of thousands of viruses, neatly arranged in a grid. Similar tools have already proved their worth in viral detective work - the closely related Virochip was used to identify the SARS virus in 2002. This time, the technique brought up a strong hit for Reston ebola.

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Rapamycin - the Easter Island drug that extends lifespan of old mice

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:00:05 -0500

It's 1964, and a group of Canadian scientists had sailed across the Pacific to Easter Island in order to study the health of the isolated local population. Working below the gaze of the island's famous statues, they collected a variety of soil samples and other biological material, unaware that one of these would yield an unexpected treasure. It contained a bacterium that secreted a new antibiotic, one that proved to be a potent anti-fungal chemical. The compound was named rapamycin after the traditional name of its island source - Rapa Nui.

Skip forward 35 years and rapamycin has made a stunning journey from the soil of a Pacific island to the besides of the world's hospitals. Its ability to suppress the immune system means that it's given to transplant patients to stop them from rejecting their organs and its ability to stop cells from dividing has formed the basis of potential anti-cancer drugs. But the chemical has an even more interesting ability and one that has only just been discovered - it can extend lifespan, at least in mice.

David Harrison, Randy Strong and Richard Miller, leading a team of 13 American scientists, have found that capsules of rapamycin can extend the lifespans of mice that eat them by 9-14%. That's especially amazing given that the mice were already 20-months-old at the time of feeding, the equivalent in mouse years of a 60-year-old human.

There will undoubtedly be headlines that proclaim the discovery of the fountain of youth or some such, but it is absolutely critical to say up front that this is not a drug that people should be taking to extend their lives. Rapamycin has a host of side effects including, as previously mentioned, the ability to suppress the immune system. Harrison says, "It may do more harm than good, as we know neither optimal doses nor schedules of when to start for anti-ageing effects." So the new discovery doesn't put an anti-ageing pill within our grasp. It's far better to see it as a gateway for understanding more about the basic biology of ageing, and for designing other chemicals that can provide the same benefits without the unwanted risky side effects.

Nonetheless, it's still very exciting, especially since the nutrition market is already awash with supplements that claim to slow the ageing process but which have little evidence to back their claims. Likewise, scientists have tested a number of different chemicals but the few positive effects have typically been small or restricted to a specific strain of mouse. Rapamycin is different - as Harrison himself explains, "no other intervention has been this effective when starting so late in life on such a diverse population."

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The bigger the ego, the harder the fall - how self-awareness buffers against social rejection

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:20:06 -0500

We all know them - supremely confident, arrogant people with inflated views of themselves. They strut and swagger, seemingly impervious to critical opinions, threats of failure or the glare of self-awareness. You may be able to tell that I don't like such people very much, which is why new research from Sander Thomaes from Utrecht University makes me smirk.

Thomaes found that people with unrealistically inflated opinions of themselves, far from proving more resilient in the face of social rebuffs, actually suffer more because of it. Some psychologists hold that "positive illusions" provide a mental shield that buffers its bearers from the threats of rejection or criticism. But according to Thomaes, realistic self-awareness is a much healthier state of mind.

He studied a group of 206 children aged 9-12, a point in life when popularity and acceptance among your peers seems all-important. Every child rated how much they liked each one of their classmates on a scale from zero (not at all) to three (very much). They also predicted the rating that each classmate would give them. The two scores were only moderately related to one another (a correlation of 0.52), and the difference between them provided a measure of each child's self-awareness. Kids with inflated egos had positive differences while those with negative scores thought worse of themselves than their peers did had.

Two weeks later, Thomaes brought back all the children for an experiment. They were told that they would be taking part in the Survivor Game -an online popularity contest where groups of four players had to complete a personal profile, and a panel of peers would vote out the person they liked the least. The game was a front - in reality, half of the children were randomly told that they were least liked and voted out, while the other half were simply told that this dishonour had befallen someone else.

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On cheerleaders and watchdogs - the role of science journalism

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:20:36 -0500

The recent World Conference of Science Journalists included a wide variety of delegates, from professional hacks who cover science beats, to enthusiastic freelancers and bloggers like me, to people working in press offices and communications departments. And with such diversity, it was perhaps inevitable that people should discuss which of these gathered attendees actually counted as journalists? And what exactly does science journalism entail?

Certainly, the idea that journalism equated to talking or writing about science in any form was unpopular. In the opening plenary, Fiona Fox drew a fine line between science communication and journalism, the latter characterised foremost by a process of scrutiny. Gavin McFayden, Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, described most science news as "stenography" or a "cheerleading operation". Over Twitter, Ivan Oransky explained to me, "For many, including me despite my MD background, you can only be a journalist because of conflicts".

These comments espouse a division between science journalism as either a cheerleader or a watchdog, as noted in a recent Nature editorial. To many, journalists only succeed in blowing the trumpet of science, regurgitating content from published papers and press releases when they ought to be subjecting it to further scrutiny by questioning statistics and hype and exposing dodgy data, fraudulent practices, and conflicts of interest (some scientists would add that they don't even do the first job particularly well).

Tied into this idea is the concept of "investigative journalism", which I mentioned in an earlier post on the embargo process. That prompted other bloggers to ask what "investigative journalism" means in the context of science. Physioprof asked, "What kind of 'investigative journalism' could science journalists possibly engage in that relate to scientific discoveries per se, and not things like corruption or fraud?"

What we have here is a conflict about the very meaning about the word 'journalism' (and to a lesser extent, the phrase 'investigative journalism'). It's a semantic têtê-a-têtê fit for a place among even the nerdiest of scientific disputes. I am not even going to attempt to solve it here, but I do want to discuss the distinction between cheerleader and watchdog, between uncritically waving the banner for science and actually digging into it. And to me, there are two ways of watching the dog.

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Who are you?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:00:00 -0500

At the recent WCSJ, and particularly after winning this prize, loads of lovely people came up to me and said that they read and enjoyed this blog.Which always comes as a surprise, because by and large, I have no idea who reads this blog.

So this seems a good a time as any to resurrect a thread that I started ages ago to find out more about you - my readers.

Identify yourself in the comments. Even if you've never commented before, speak up. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? Are you interesting lay-person, practicing scientist, journalist, sentient virus, or something else? Are you a close friend, colleague, acquaintance or stranger?

Enlighten me.

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Mobs of honeybees suffocate hornets to death

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:00:11 -0500

Earlier today, I published a post on how Japanese honeybees defend themselves from hornets with a mass defence that relies on heat and carbon dioxide. This article was originally written two years ago, and describes the slightly different tactic of Cyprian honeybees.

When Oriental hornets attack, Cyprian honeybees mob them in a huge ball that targets the breathing apparatus in the hornet's abdomen. The hornets can't breathe without expanding their abdomens and with sheer numbers, the bees strangle the hornets to death.

Hornets are giant wasps that pack a powerful sting. To most people, they can be a painful nuisance, but to honeybees, they're killing machines. Hornets greatly outsize and overpower honeybees and a few individuals can decimate entire colonies.

Asian honeybees have developed a remarkable defence called 'heat-balling' against their local hornet, Vespa velutina. A giant ball of bees piles onto the predator, weighing it down while vibrating their wing muscles. The frenetic activity greatly increases the temperature inside the ball to about 46C - hot enough to cook the hornet alive, but five degrees under the bees' maximum tolerated temperature.

Cyprian honeybees face a different predator, the Oriental hornet Vespa orientalis and unlike its wimpier cousin V.velutina, this species can take the heat. The Oriental hornet lives in hot, dry climates ranging from Central Asia to the Mediterrenean and it tolerates temperatures just as high as honeybees.

Heat-balling shouldn't work on them. And yet, Cyprian bees still encase Oriental hornets in large balls. Surprisingly, the strategy works - despite their heat tolerance, the hornets still die. The bees' stings are useless against the hornet's tough cuticle and they barely use them. What could they be doing instead?

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Bees kill hornets with carbon dioxide emissions and local warming

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:00:29 -0500

Rising temperatures and high carbon dioxide emissions are the means through which humans are inadvertently causing the decline of several species. But one animal actively uses both heat and carbon dioxide as murderous weapons - the unassuming honeybee.

With their stings and numbers, bees already seem to be well-defended but they are completely outgunned by giant hornets (right). These two-inch long monsters are three times longer than several times heavier than tiny honeybees and raiding parties can decimate entire hives. European bees mount little in the way of an effective defence, but Japanese bees aren't so helpless. When their hives are invaded, they launch a mass counterattack.

Swarms of workers dogpile the hornet, pinning it down while vibrating their wing muscles. At the centre of this "heatball", the frenetic buzzing heats up the hornet to a roasting 45 degrees Celsius.

Scientists have long thought that this manoeuvre bakes the hornet alive, for the bees that surround it are more resistant to high temperatures. But Michio Sugahara and Fumio Sakamoto from Kyoto Gakuen University have found that this isn't the whole story.

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By eating fruit, birds protect Serengeti forests from beetles

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:00:25 -0500

Walks through a forest are often made all the more enjoyable by the chance to watch brightly coloured birds flit between the trees. But birds are not just mere inhabitants of forests - in some parts of the world, they are the key to the trees' survival.

The Serengeti is one such place. Since 1950, around 70-80% of riverside forests have disappeared from this area. Fires seem to be a particular problem, opening large gaps in the canopy that forests can't seem to recover from. To understand why Gregory Sharam from the University of British Columbia has been monitoring the density of the forests since 1966. From 1997-2006, he studied 18 particular patches at varying stages of decline.

During this time, as the forest density declined, so too did the number of bird species in the area. The total number halved and fruit-eating species were especially hit, declining from 16 to 6 species. These fruit-eaters perform a valuable service for a wide variety of trees, eating their fruit and dispersing their unharmed seeds. In pristine forest, around 70% of all seeds on the forest floor have previously passed through the guts of birds. In fragmented open forest, that proportion falls to 3%.

Without fewer birds, seeds that simply fall to the ground become more important for the trees' survival but these too suffer without their feathered friends. They are destroyed by seed-eating bruchid beetles. The beetles generally avoid seeds that are still on trees and for some reason, they also steer clear of seeds that have been previously eaten by birds. But seeds that naturally drop to the ground are fair game and as tree density fell, the beetles' attack rate climbed from 20% to 90%.

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Does science journalism falter or flourish under embargo?

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:00:02 -0500

One of the highlights of the World Conference of Science Journalists was the final day's heated debate about embargoes. For newcomers to the issue, journalists are often given press alerts about new papers before they are made publicly available, on the understanding that they aren't reported before a certain deadline - the infamous embargo. This is why so much science news magically appears at simultaneously across news outlets. All the major journals (and many minor ones) do this with their papers, as increasingly do universities and other research institutions.

Vincent Kiernan (who has written a book deriding this practice) launched the first volley against embargoes by urging journalists to "just walk away" from them. He described them as a set of "velvet handcuffs", leashing journalists to the goal of providing "infotainment or carry[ing] water for scientific establishments" instead of their giving people the information they need. To him, embargoes play on the "pack mentality" of journalists, luring them in with the fear of missing a story. Far from duplicating the same news as everyone else, society, he says, needs journalists to "follow news noses to find stories that establishment doesn't want you to cover". That is the key to flourishing in the era of new media - to provide unique content not via embargoed material.

Kiernan paved the road for an even more brutal (and much louder) onslaught by Richard Horton, editor of an obscure medical journal called the Lancet, who suffers from a 14-year embargo addiction. Looking like he was on the verge of spontaneously detonating (and noting with possible accuracy that he was about to get himself fired), he derided journalists for "equating reproduction with communication" and writing material filtered through the lens of biased press releases. "You're sold your soul to publicity masquerading as science," he shouted, adding that embargoes hand power over to journals, allowing them to dictate to institutions that have actually done the work.

To me, both these arguments are reflective of the massive conflation that pervaded the entire debate. The anti-embargo side consistently equated embargoes (which, let's face it, are just time constraints) with the press releases they are actually constraining. Geoff Watts of BBC Radio also noted this conflation. A further logical leap was made in assuming that the very existence of press releases (and thus embargoes) necessarily leads to shoddy churnalism, and I'd like to think that this blog, at the very least, is an exception to that model.

Similarly, the concept that ridding science reporters of embargoes would foment more investigative journalism is surely too simplistic. As Nick Davies discussed in his much earlier session, PR leads to poor journalism by exploiting structural problems that are already present - lack of reporters, tight deadlines and increasing workloads which lead to less time per story.

These overarching factors, much more so than any inherent laziness, are the reasons that even enterprising journalists regurgitate press releases. Stripping away embargoes, or even those releases, isn't going to magically solve the underlying lack of time. Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre rightly picked Kiernan up for this failure to make the case that embargoes have precipitated a loss of investigative reporting. When pushed, he conceded that the "real problem is not the embargo", it's the competitive system we work in and time-specific nature of editorial demands.

What of the reverse question - will the loss of embargoes lead to a deluge of scoops? Watts thinks not, saying that scoops are relatively uncommon in science journalism. When they exist and are sufficiently big, they aren't drowned out by other embargoed material. Indeed, Mark Henderson, Science Editor at the Times, noted that the embargo is a simple, benign "bilateral agreement about information provision that is often fetishised as a big rule". It's often not appreciated that if information is sourced through another route (investigative ones, say, rather than press alerts), then embargoes don't apply and journalists are at liberty to report at their convenience (as Paul Sutherland did with his Mars scoop).

In light of this, Henderson noted that the much bigger problem is the Inglefinger rule, the draconian policy where a journal will only consider publishing research if it has not been submitted elsewhere or already reported. The rule scares researchers away from talking about their work for fear of the journal's retribution. But critically, at that point in the proceedings, the news has not been embargoed and no press release has been written.

Watts summed it up by dismissing the embargo issue as a "minor technicality in larger debate about media". He eloquently compared the lot of the journalist to that of a fighter pilot - parachutes aren't desirable because it's better that the plane doesn't crash at all but until that risk is non-existent, you'd be daft to disregard this necessary safety measure. Likewise, embargoes provide both journalists and science as a whole with benefits that it would be remiss to ignore.

For a start, they "bring a measure of order to chaotic flow of events". Predictability allows you to allocate time to more thorough investigation, contacting people, digging into background and so on. I wholeheartedly agree. I find it a tremendous help to be able to plan what I want to write about in a given week, to select the most interesting of forthcoming papers and to take time over assessing the quality of potential fodder. And I do this in my spare time; it's even more pertinent for people working on busy news desks and particularly for broadcasters who need to deploy film crews.

But first and foremost, the main benefit of embargoes is that they lead to more overall science coverage. While they may certainly skew the balance away from smaller journals, they also skew the balance towards smaller stories. Watts alluded to this, positing a hypothetical embargo-free world where important stories will get covered anyway, but those that fail to shatter earth (such as this piece on the learning ability of sticklebacks) simply won't get in. If these interesting but less practically important works do somehow fight off competition for column space in one paper, it is unlikely that opposition outlets will pick them up. And that will be a massive shame for science and the general public alike.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the winning argument. I am a scientist first and a journalist second and my concern is far less for the prevalence of investigative journalism than it is for giving the public more and more opportunities to hear about science. It is those opportunities that are in danger of becoming endangered should embargoes vanish.

You could, of course, argue that this greater quantity of science coverage is a shallow victory when so much is regurgitated or inaccurate. But, as I've noted earlier, this is not the fault of the embargo - it's a fault of journalistic practices fuelled by other structural problems. For many journalists, embargoes actually give you the time to not regurgitate and to craft material more carefully. This is especially true for the biggest stories (ironically those would probably get covered without an embargo, and indeed, whose embargoes are most commonly broken) that need good analysis.

More on science journalism

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Ferreting out swine flu - virus causes slightly more severe disease than seasonal flu

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:00:26 -0500

The swine flu pandemic is well under way. With the WHO citing almost 60,000 laboratory-confirmed cases at the time of writing, the race is truly on to understand more about the virus. Now, two new studies have painted a fresh but partly contradictory picture about two of the virus's most important aspects - its infectivity (its ability to spread from host to host) and its virulence (its ability to cause disease in a host). These two traits will largely determine the threat that the virus poses, especially in relation to more familiar garden varieties of seasonal flu.

Both groups, one based in the US and the other in the Netherlands, tested the virus's behaviour in ferrets. These animals are affected by flu viruses in much the same way as humans, mimicking both the severity of our infections and ease of our viral transmission.

Both studies found that the new swine flu virus takes a slightly greater toll on its host's health than the usual strains of seasonal flu. These strains limit their infections to a ferret's nasal passages but the new swine flu virus makes its way into the lungs too. The Americans, led by Taronna Maines at the CDC, even found traces of the virus in the ferrets' gut.

This helps to explain the unusual profile of symptoms associated with swine flu. Most patients experience typical mild flu symptoms but an unusually large proportion (around 40% or so) have also suffered from unusual symptoms like vomiting and diarrhoea. Some have also been hospitalised due to severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, occasionally with fatal consequences. A flu virus that is unusually good at infecting the lungs and gut certainly make sense of these cases.

However, when it came to the virus's ability to spread, the two research teams disagree. The Americans found that swine flu is less easily transmitted from ferret to ferret than other seasonal viruses of the same H1N1 subtype. However, the Dutch team, led by Vincent Munster from the Erasmus Medical Center, found that the new virus transmits just as easily as its seasonal counterparts.

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Climate change and the mystery of the shrinking sheep

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:44 -0500

The island of Hirta, on the western coast of Scotland, is home to a special breed of sheep. Soay sheep, named after a neighbouring island, are the most primitive breed of domestic sheep and have lived on the isles of St Kilda for at least a millennium. They're generally smaller than the average domesticated sheep, and that difference is getting larger and larger. Over the last 20 years, the Soay sheep have started to shrink.

They are becoming gradually lighter at all ages such that today's lambs and adults weigh around 3kg less than those from 1986. Their hind legs have also shortened to a similar degree, suggesting that they have indeed shrunk, rather than fallen increasingly ill.

The reasons behind this downward trend have now been revealed by a group of British scientists led by Arpat Ozgul from Imperial College. Using decades' worth of data, the team showed that natural selection normally favours larger sheep, as the odds of survival increase with body size. But this evolutionary pressure has been overwhelmed by the effects of climate change. Warmer winters have led to easier conditions, and less need to pile on the pounds in the first years of life. The lambs can afford to grow more slowly and they become smaller adults, who are only physically capable of raising small young themselves.

Soay sheep live in a closed population that doesn't have to deal with human interference, predators, migrants (either in or out), or significant competitors. That makes them an ideal population to study if you're an evolutionary biologist interested in how animal populations change over time. One such group, including Ozgul and his colleague Tim Coulson, have been studying the Soay sheep since 1985 and have brilliantly called themselves SLAPPED (short for Studies in Longitudinal Analysis of Population Persistence and Evolutionary Demography).

The group wanted to work out the extent to which the sheep's shrinking size is due to the influence of natural selection and to what extent it is just an ecological response to changing environments. To that end, they developed a mathematical job designed to analyse their 24 years of data and tease apart these contrasting effects.

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I just won the Association of British Science Writers' Best Newcomer award!

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:17:12 -0500

What a night.

Tonight, during the gala dinner of the World Conference of Science Journalists, I won the Association of British Science Writers' award for Best Newcomer 2009, collecting a certificate, an award and prize money in the Natural History Museum's central hall. In front of me: hundreds of international science journalists and Dippy the Diplodocus. Behind me: a statue of Charles Darwin. If that isn't reward for efforts in writing about science, I don't know what is.

Anyway, the award was a result of popular vote from members of the ABSW, so my heartiest thanks to anyone and everyone who voted, to Natasha for a lovely introduction and to everyone who came up and said congratulations. It's a superlative honour and it was a pleasure to have met you all. Memo to self: winning an award makes networking, an activity I loathe and dread with a fiery passion, remarkably easy and passive.

I find it incredibly interesting that amid the unsaid conference themes of saving journalism, the rise of new media, and what actually qualifies as journalism, that this award should go to someone who freelances as a journalist but also works in science communication and blogs. I'm going to start describing myself as a triple-reassortant science writer.

Anyway, a couple of amusing things are worth noting. Firstly, my name is spelled wrongly in different ways on both the certificate (Ed Wong) and the tube it came in (Ed Young). A lovely lady from the ABSW took my address down to send me a corrected version, but I may try and see if any particularly wealthy Ed Wongs would like to buy the original.

The book I was given is this, and I have a history with it. I wrote about 2% of it as one of my first ever freelance gigs about two years ago. The cheeky publishers never sent me (nor any of the other contributor, nor indeed the editors) any copies so it's great to finally have one (and amusing to hear screams of, "I never got a copy either!" throughout the evening.

And finally, the setting was really special. I first came to London almost 20 years ago to the day, and the Natural History Museum was one of the things that made me fall in love with the city and, indeed, the country. It was where I saw my first dinosaur skeletons. It was where I first heard of some guy called David Attenborough and bought something called Life on Earth. I go back every year for the photography competition and a spot of ice-skating. The NHM is one of my favourite places and the fact that this happened there just made it that much more special.

If there's one thing I regret, it's that later on in the evening, they played Carmina Burana through the speakers. Not exactly the music-of-choice for a relaxed chat over wine, but also why couldn't they have played it while I was climbing up to get the award? That would have been awesome.

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Spider mimics ant to eat spiders and avoid being eaten by spiders

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:30:31 -0500

It's been just three weeks since I last wrote about the dark-footed ant-spider Myrmarachne melanotarsa, but this is one species that just keeps getting more and more interesting. To quickly recap, M.melanotarsa is a jumping spider that protects itself from predators (like other jumping spiders) by resembling an ant. Earlier this month, Ximena Nelson and Robert Jackson showed that they bolster this illusion by living in silken apartment complexes and travelling in groups, mimicking not just the bodies of ants but their social lives too.

Now Nelson and Robert are back with another side to the ant-spider's tale - it also uses its impersonation for attack as well as defence. It also feasts on the eggs and youngsters of the very same spiders that its ant-like form protects it from. It is, essentially, a spider that looks like an ant to avoid being eaten by spiders so that it itself can eat spiders.

Its actively raids the silken nests of other spiders and snatches the eggs and hatchlings within. These youngsters would be safe from any normal ant but being a spider in ant's clothing, M.melanotarsa has no problem with moving through silk. But they still have to get past the parents.

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