The first sentence in Egg Production in a Coastal Seabird, the Glaucous-Winged Gull (Larus glaucescens), Declines during the Last Century is as follows:
Seabirds integrate information about oceanic ecosystems across time and space, and are considered sensitive indicators of marine conditions.
The rest is here.
Going back to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, there has been a tradition of sidewalk astronomy. Sidewalk astronomy is really just what it sounds like: using a telescope on the sidewalk or street corner. Whether for free or for a small fee, these astronomers enticed the public to engage with outer space in an informal and exciting way.
More recently, John Dobson, an amateur astronomer, has brought sidewalk astronomy to the people of San Francisco. Beginning in the Nineteen Sixties, he has been engaging the public, even founding the organization of San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers. Dobson also created a simple way for amateurs to build large telescopes, which are now known as Dobsonian telescopes:
The night is full of wondrous things—giant galaxies that look like pinwheels, clusters where stars swarm like bees, gauzy nebulae adrift in the Milky Way—but most of these lie beyond the capacity of the human eye. A large telescope—the larger the better to gather light—makes these objects visible. Says legendary comet-hunter David Levy, borrowing a thought from Bob Summerfield, co-director of Astronomy To Go, a traveling star lab: “Newton made telescopes for astronomers to observe the universe; John Dobson makes telescopes for the rest of us.”
Nearly a million people have looked through Dobson’s telescopes, which he constructs from castoff pieces of plywood and scraps of two-by-fours, cardboard centers of hose reels, chunks of cereal boxes and portholes from old ships. He puts his scopes on portable mounts that swivel sideways and up and down. “The Dobsonian Revolution was with just letting people look through the big telescopes, which was an extraordinary thing to do,” says Levy. “I think every advanced amateur astronomer in the world has at least one Dobson telescope.”
More here.
Recently, Google News separated its Science and Technology sections into two distinct parts. This seems to have been desired for some time and is a welcome change.
For many people, technology and engineering are part of the same intellectual package that science is a part of. But that’s not really true. While it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the two–the fruits of each can lead to breakthroughs in the other–they are distinct. Henry Petroski, a professor at Duke, wrote a thought-provoking article in IEEE Spectrum in December 2010 titled Engineering is Not Science, about this distinction:
Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things. Conflating these separate objectives leads to uninformed opinions, which in turn can delay or misdirect management, effort, and resources.
Take this year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. No one, to the best of my knowledge, blamed it on science. Poor engineering decisions allowed gas to escape from a well in deep water, which in turn caused a fatal explosion. Subsequently, the engineered blowout preventer failed, and for months oil escaped into the environment. Poor engineering got us into the mess; surely only good engineering could get us out of it. Yet repeatedly, government and other research scientists were allowed to veto the engineering tactics needed to stanch the flow. In the end, of course, it was engineering that finally capped the well.
…
Throughout history, a full scientific understanding has been neither necessary nor sufficient for great technological advances: The era of the steam engine, notably, was well into its second century before a fully formed science of thermodynamics had been developed. Indeed, sometimes science has impeded progress. Had Marconi believed his physicist contemporaries, he would have “known” that wireless telegraphy signals could not be sent across the ocean, around Earth’s curvature.
Engineers welcome any and all available scientific knowledge, but they needn’t wait for scientists to give them the go-ahead to invent, design, or develop the machinery to advance technology or to check it when it runs out of control. Without understanding this, we will continue to underfund the engineering needed to solve our greatest problems.
Thanks to @underSixFoot for the pointer to the change in Google News.
Do baseball teams that have to travel across time zones, and are therefore subject to jet lag, more likely to lose games? This question, resulting in the concept of circadian advantage, was taken up in a letter in Nature back in 1995:
Many factors undoubtedly contribute to winning baseball games, but our data indicate that one critical, previously unrecognized component of the ‘home field’ advantage of east and west coast baseball teams involves previous transcontinental travel by the visiting team within the preceding two days, but only if the direction of travel is eastward…
While the performance decrements described her might seem small in magnitude, their consequences for competitive athletics are substantial.
More here (subscription required).
This is one of those announcement posts: I’m finishing my postdoc at Harvard this summer and, as of mid-August, I will be beginning a position as a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Foundation is devoted to understanding entrepreneurship, broadly construed, and is one of those places positively brimming with interdisciplinary and ground-breaking ideas. I am incredibly excited about this opportunity, where I will be getting the chance to think about innovation and growth, how cities develop and act as engines of productivity, and lots of other cool ideas. And of course, I will continue to do lots of popular writing.
Anyway, as the Kauffman Foundation is based in Kansas City, I’ll leave you with a Grantland article by Chris Suellentrop about Hard Times in the Paris of the Plains.