So Glass from Google helps people see what you see, in a hands-free way that’s simpler to use than a handheld camera. To me, that could lead to an explosion of first-person perspective films.

A number of movies have been shot from the point of view of a main character over the years. Very often these were film noirs — the entirety of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake was filmed from the first-person perspective, as was the first third of the Bogart and Bacall flick Dark Passage. Still, point-of-view movies are rare.

First-person video games have made the first-person point-of-view far more common. Flight simulators and first-person shooters such as Halo form major genres, and popular games such as Myst and Mirror’s Edge

First-person movies can certainly excite with sex and violence. Notwithstanding the not-safe-for-work title, the hyperkinetic short film Bad M**********r (above) is a lot of fun, coming across as Kotaku says as a cross between Mirror’s Edge and Reservoir Dogs. And yes, there is point-of-view porn out there, and at least one porn studio has already noted Glass might be great for shooting it.

The first Google Glass video was a day-in-the-life piece meant to highlight what it was like to use the device, and certainly day-in-the-life movies could be interesting.

More exciting is the possibility that people film exciting things from their point of view like jumping from an airplane. We could see a whole new kind of movie star, akin to the simstim stars of William Gibson’s cyberpunk Sprawl trilogy, whose followers could view through their eyes, hear with their ears, feel with their skin, taste with their tongue. It’s only a matter of time before science catches up with science fiction. There are lots of experiments one could try with this as well, such as multiple people filming the same movie, so viewers can choose multiple perspectives.

A powerful benefit of Glass from Google is how it could help people see what you see at the same time you are seeing it. I believe this could open up an extraordinary market of services based on helping other people out. Imagine being able to recruit aid from a seasoned expert, or a “mission control”-type room of experts, or just your friends? There are possibly also some tricky legal and criminal possibilities involved.

I brainstorm a number of ideas below, many of which I don’t actually see happening. Still, it’s fun to speculate.

* Tech support. Imagine you’re having difficulties with your computer. Instead of laboriously telling somebody the problem you’re experiencing, why not just show them?

Tech support via Glass can range anywhere from helping a parent to full-blown “Houston, we have a problem” Apollo-13-style critical system failures.

* Translation. Google emphasizes that you can ask Glass how to say something in another language. However, as of now, Glass apparently can’t help you translate foreign text. I can imagine Glass users contacting translation companies or crowdsourcing agencies such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that can help you translate signs, documents and so on for a given fee, which might be really helpful in foreign countries.

* Emergencies. A bit along the lines of tech support, especially for Apollo-13-type situations, but with even broader implications. Warren Ellis had a comic book series I loved called Global Frequency that had a task force of agents scattered across the globe who could pool their expertise together via smartphones — I can imagine augmented reality headsets such as Glass serving as the next generation. Sci-fi author David Brin’s novel Existence has a scene where a main character recruits a giant pool of volunteers over the Internet to basically crowdsource a way to stop a disaster as well. Emergency services from the authorities might list places to seek aid or shelter. Really, you can imagine virtually any scene from an action movie or TV show where the heroes are given advice via cell phone or earpiece.

* Dating. I don’t think Glass will help much with dating, but I can’t help but think of Cyrano de Bergerac in this context, whispering romantic advice into your ear. (I don’t see people wearing Glass on dates — at least, not on successful dates — but who knows how things might change in the future? For the record, I think wearing Glass on a date would be at least as bad as checking your phone obviously and repeatedly.)

* Bomb disposal. A subset of emergencies. I doubt Glass will actually help much here — civilians should get the hell away from bombs, and I imagine bomb disposal experts already use cameras to look at bombs and ask others for help if need be. Still, putting it on the list.

* Shopping. Imagine asking a friend whether an outfit looks good on you, or a fashion expert. Shopping consultants might be able to carve out niches remotely providing extremely personalized recommendations.

* Military operations. The first exposure I had to the idea of military commanders following what soldiers were doing via camera was the movie Aliens. In real life, the Navy SEALS that killed Osama bin Laden may have wore helmet cameras, although there are conflicting accounts of whether this is true. I don’t actually see Glass being used in military operations for tech support types of purposes, but augmented reality has roots in military head-mounted displays and in general certainly may see use in the battlefield.

* Tour guides. Audio tours already exist for locations such as museums — why not have an expert or a team of experts tell you what you are looking, with an art professor helping you one moment and a history professor another, all using Glass and video-conferencing via Google Hangouts? I don’t see Glass putting tour guides out of work, since they do more than just telling people about sites, such as arranging accommodations and troubleshooting problems, but Glass might help add an interesting dimension.

* How to. There are now many sites that aim to explain how to do things, such as wikiHow, eHow and HowCast. I’m not sure if there will be many or any services offering experts that can help people how to, say, change a tire or bake a cake, but who knows?

* Science. It’d be interesting whether Glass could help science. For instance, one could hold a fossil up for others to examine, showing paleontologists what it looks like from each side.

* Medicine. I don’t see Glass really being used as a way for doctors to offer house calls to patients, since a medical examination often needs more than just a look to reveal anything. Still, it might be interesting if Glass could be used as a way for doctors to consult other doctors for help.

* Comedy. Imagine having a writer’s room of comedians helping you with jokes? I don’t really see this happening, but there was a lottery commercial that depicted the scenario:

* Porn. Ew. Well, porn finds a way to use the Internet in a vast amount of ways, and Glass will certainly find a way into that toolkit, I imagine.

This actually leads me to potential legal and criminal implications of this. What happens if what you show people gets misused in some way? For instance, might you inadvertently let burglars case your house for them? Also, what happens if you see something criminal happening while you are talking with someone over Glass? Are you liable if you don’t report anything, or liable if you do?

Google aims to help change the way we see the world with Glass, a transparent video display that rests lightweight in front of your eyes and whispers into your ears. The sci-fi novel “Existence” from best-selling author David Brin proposes an intriguing possibility for Glass — to essentially marry it with Facebook.

Glass offers a first-person, hands-free approach to video and photo display, recording and broadcasting, and for videophony and video conferencing.

Glass can also deliver all the other data we now expect from mobile devices — email, text, weather, appointments, dictation, translation, Wikipedia, Google (naturally) and the rest of the web, when connected wirelessly via mobile device to the Internet.

However, the most interesting possibilities for Glass lie with augmented reality, or AR — overlaying data about what we see over what we see. The first step Glass presents on this path is to overlay maps and directions over a wearer’s field of view.

Augmented reality mapping apps exist aplenty for mobile devices, such as ones from AcrossAir.

Still, with its ease of use, Glass might bring AR to the mainstream. What then?

The host of augmented reality apps that already exist for mobile devices suggest a number of prosaic options, such as finding places to eat, stay and enjoy. The fact that Google already provides, say, Zagat reviews for restaurants with map search results suggests location tagging may prove easy for Glass. (Google may want to put ads up. Lots of ads up.)

But what about combining AR with social media? What happens if you could see people’s Facebook profiles hovering over them? Or their online dating profiles on OKCupid? Or wanted posters from the FBI? In “Existence,” Brin described overlays that included palatable layers and grubbier, illicit ones.

How might augmented reality intersect with social media? Well, one possibility involves people with mobile devices voluntarily making their identities known publicly. Another involves coupling Glass with facial recognition and image search — by asking “OK, Glass, who is that?” Glass might very well tell you. (Does neither possibility sound appealing to you? Hold on…)

Knowing a person’s name can be a great thing — many people, including me, can be lousy with names. However, once a person’s identity is known, depending on what databases you have access to, you could learn an extraordinary amount on that person. Publicly accessibly Facebook profiles. Details gleanable via Google searches. Reputation scores on Slashdot, Reddit or Digg. Facts about what they’ve posted, commented, viewed, bought. Criminal history. Phone numbers. Email addresses. What they’re looking for in a date.

There are two kind of databases I can see emerging — ones where you say what you want about yourself to others, and ones where others say what they think about you. The first kind include microblogging systems such as Facebook or Twitter, or online dating systems such as OKCupid. The second kind include government and private-sector databases including criminal records, school records, voting records, viewing habits, bills, and so on — I suppose you could say bathroom stall graffiti such as “For a good time, call…” might also yield dating info.

There’s a lot of ways all this data could be used in a disturbing manner. For example, you could imagine gossip sites where people can post all kinds of details about you, true or false, that you would rather others not know. You could imagine things about you that you thought were private, such as your voting record or Facebook status updates, posted or sold against your knowledge or will.

“To get name tags and profiles under peoples’ faces as you walk by will require support databases,” Brin said to me. “Either: 1) a world comprehensive face-recognition system tied to uber-Facebook; or 2) commercial systems, at first non-comprehensive; or 3) lesser club-level face-recog systems operating under opt-in; or 4) self-fed systems where you load the images and features yourself.”

Brin is a known, vocal advocate of transparency, even writing a work of nonfiction about it that won the American Library Association’s Freedom of Speech Award. He believes the benefits transparency can bring would be substantial. “The ability of citizens to look back at the mighty — called ‘sousveillance,’ the opposite of surveillance — will be key to people staying free,” he said. “It could also lead, after a transition, to a return of some privacy, as citizens become technologically empowered to catch the peeping toms.”

What concerns Brin is people passing too many laws restricting information flow. “The world’s elites will simply ignore such a ban,” Brin stated. “The rich and mighty — governments, corporations, criminals — will all have such databases, spy cameras, everything. They will walk down our streets like gods, knowing everything about us as they stroll, giggling, past us. But we’ll be blind, having chosen to panic and refuse the power of sight.”

I liked “Existence” because it has links to what may be my favorite Brin short story, “Lungfish.” Although I personally don’t hold completely with his stance on transparency, I found his use of augmented reality layers in “Existence” thought-provoking.

Augmented reality could face a tough road ahead, Brin said to me. “We’ll face a 20-year transition period where people react with loathing toward mobile AR, as they did to movable type, eyeglasses, cell phones,” Brin predicted. “Already many places ban Google Glass.”

Due to Google’s rivalry with Facebook, I don’t see a marriage between Glass and Facebook happening. However, maybe Glass will attempt this strategy with Google+, Google’s endeavor to compete with Facebook. Other companies may also make AR glasses of their own, and Facebook can partner with them instead.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

A tadpole missing eyes on its head that had an eye implanted on its tail. Credit: Douglas Blackiston.

Science to me is about exploring what’s unknown and what’s impossible. So what happens if you implant eyes onto a tail of a blinded tadpole? One might not expect anything — the brain of a tadpole didn’t evolve to find an eye on its tail. But developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University and his colleagues discovered these eyes can help tadpoles see again, helping reveal how adaptable the brain is. (For more images, look at this photo gallery.)

Crazily enough, the eyes survive the destruction of the tail during tadpole to frog metamorphosis and end up healthy. On the frogs’ butts.

A frog with an eye on its behind. Credit: Douglas Blackiston.

I’m actually familiar with bizarre tadpoles — I wrote my baccalaureate thesis on headless tadpoles and the brou-ha-ha that erupted over wild claims such research would lead to human organ factories based on headless clones. Never mind artificial wombs currently don’t exist, so one would have to find women to raise such clones inside them. Never mind headless clones wouldn’t survive to term.

Top: Headless tadpole. Middle: Regular tadpole. Bottom: Tailless tadpole.

When I asked Levin if he felt weird painstakingly grafting eyes into the tails of tadpoles, he said such research was actually normal for him — “we have four-headed worms, six-legged frogs, and many other unusual creatures here as part of our work on bioelectricity and organ regeneration.”

Four-headed worms? Six-legged frogs? Frogs with eyes on their butts? I’m launching a new feature here to highlight these strange, extraordinary creatures.

The name for what I hope will be a weekly series, “A Menagerie of Curiosities,” refers to the wonder rooms and cabinets of curiosities that housed anomalies and mysteries in Renaissance Europe and ultimately served as the forerunners of museums. (A great modern cabinet of curiosity is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, featured in the book “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder,” both of which I highly recommend.)

A display of such oddities might undoubtedly come across as a circus freak show, and I won’t deny a certain morbid curiosity on my part with such work. But these experiments aren’t done for sport — they shine a light on how the fundamentals of life work. For instance, these findings are evidence the brain may survey its body to figure out what it can do instead of limiting use of its body parts to expected roles. If this were not the case, every time a mutation led to an anatomical improvement, the change would be useless and the animal might die and not pass on its beneficial mutation. As such, the brain’s adaptability makes it easier for complex new body features to evolve.

Ultimately, Levin hopes this work can help treat blindness and other sensory disorders, by testing how adaptable the nervous system is to, say, implants that could help people see. Furthermore, such research could not only help replace lost senses, but augment people with new ones — anyone want infrared vision?

Today I have a story out on a secret war that might have taken place for years in the embedded computers found within the devices that make up the backbone of the infrastructures of our nations and corporations. And there’s so much more to the story than might have comfortably fit into what ran, which I’ll talk about here.

PRINTER DANGER: In 2011, computer scientists revealed they could hack into printers and break into every computer linked to these printers. Image: Flickr/James F Clay

So as background, scientists at Columbia earlier showed they could fairly easily to hack into these embedded computers and use them as backdoors to infiltrate personal computers — for instance, a printer could easily get compromised by an infected document file.

The threat is potentially huge — at least a fifth of all embedded computers accessible online still have their factory default passwords, meaning just about anyone can waltz in and compromise them. Now researchers at Columbia have developed software they call “symbiotes” that might be able to not only detect and prevent online attacks on embedded computers, but also help reveal how long they might have been going on under our noses. (You can read the online story here, and the print version here.)

So it’s a pretty fun story. A little known threat, potentially very high stakes, a potential solution to the problem, and the hint of an unknown history. The thing about journalism — or at least, in my mind, responsible journalism — is that it’s about what you can prove, not about all of what you might know or think you might know. As such, there are a lot of anecdotes and speculation connected with this research that I didn’t think belonged in my story, but that I think it’s all right to discuss and speculate about informally on my blog.

First off, there was a great anecdote about how the researcher Ang Cui met with a military base and told them about their online vulnerabilities. They checked about a month later, but the vulnerabilities were still there. When Ang asked them if they knew the vulnerabilities were still up, the officer he asked just raised an eyebrow.

So yes, the vulnerabilities were still there. They apparently served as what in hacker parlance is known as a honeypot — systems set up to record enemy attacks to learn more about intruder tactics.

A real-time map of global cyberattacks. Click the image to read more.

Good luck trying to confirm the identity of the base or the fact that vulnerabilities were left out as bait for hackers. As such, an anecdote without confirmation is just hearsay, which is why I didn’t put it into the story.

An intriguing, disturbing line of conjecture that came up when I was mulling this story over is why certain nations remain so vulnerable to this line of attack. For instance, South Korea, one of the most wired countries on the planet, hasn’t patched many of these vulnerabilities yet. Given how they have a mortal enemy directly to their north, one would think they might put it on their to-do list, or how allies such as the United States might quietly tell them their fly was essentially open, especially given that an attack on South Korea might inadvertently or intentionally damage the United States as well.

What if certain vulnerabilities are intentionally being left open as giant honeypots? Defenders want to collect as much data on possible attacks as possible, so honeypots are useful for that purpose. Still, it seems like there’d be massive public outcry if so much infrastructure was intentionally left vulnerable just to collect intelligence, raising thoughts of popular ideas regarding the Coventry Blitz claiming that Churchill left Coventry burn during World War II to protect intelligence about the Enigma cypher machine.

I’m not really sure what’s the worse possibility — that countries are intentionally being left vulnerable to learn more about intruders, or that countries are unintentionally being left vulnerable out of sheer ignorance.

You can email me regarding From The Writer’s Desk at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

The very first post for this blog had to do with conjecture that it might one day be possible to manufacture brains, or people. This was no idle speculation, but a suggestion from tissue engineer Vladimir Mironov. The idea would be to use a 3-D printer, which deposits materials such as cells in solutions onto surfaces much as regular printers do with ink on paper.

The idea of copying a human brain is a formidable one, to say the least. However, one project Mironov did think was doable was creating simple “bio-robots” using bio-printing — for instance, fish-shaped bundles of eye, nerve and muscle cells. “You can shine a light on the eye cells, which send a signal over the nerve cells to the muscle, so you can make it swim left or right,” he explained. “I do not see any technical problems with the idea, but of course, people look at me like I am crazy when I suggest this.”

Recently, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated their own bio-bot, made with rat heart cells that automatically contracted in unison.

These pulsations led to bio-bots that could inch their way across surfaces like caterpillars.

Earlier work developed an artificial jellyfish bio-bot:

This was made from rat heart cells as well:

In addition to bio-printing, I recently wrote about how 3-D printing is enabling the creation of a variety of robotic devices. Many of these were inspired by biology.

The scientists who developed the artificial walking bio-bot talked about how they would one day like to print neurons onto the muscles driving the bio-bots to give them a way to more intelligently respond to their environments. Given that 3-D printing can lay down circuits, maybe it’d be more feasible to print circuits onto bio-bots? Food for thought.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

A Star Trek communicator badge

So I had earlier suggested the idea of a brooch like the communication badge seen on Star Trek that one can tap for an otherwise hands-free way of talking with the Siri voice interface system on the new iPhones.

Lo and behold, someone has done just that!

The CommBadge

To clarify as I had to do with my last post, I’m not talking about a Bluetooth interface for phone calls. I’m talking about a hands-free control for a the voice interface Siri. I’m also aware of the Vocera communications badge, although I’m not aware if it works with Siri or other voice interfaces.

Inventor Charles Krimstock in Laguna Niguel, Calif., and his colleagues developed a speakerphone that can be clipped on a shirt or hung around the neck. It can pair with a smartphone such as an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth and an app running on that phone. Those who don’t like wearing Bluetooth headsets (like me) might enjoy a hands-free system to communicate with their phone from up to 100 feet away.

I’m really looking forward to more people designing devices based on my whims. (Joking, if it’s not obvious.) You can help chip in on this project on Indiegogo — I have no financial connection with them.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

When I’m not writing about science, one of my pastimes is swordsmanship. Specifically, I’m studying Toyama Ryu Batto Do under Sang Kim sensei in New York, a style that heavily emphasizes cutting and sparring with the Japanese sword known as the katana. I’ve also tried out the German longsword tradition following the works of Liechtenauer with the New York Historical Fencing Association, and would love to learn more.

(That’s Sang Kim sensei cutting. Pretty awesome, right?)

Why study the sword? Tales of swords have entranced people for centuries — for instance, Excalibur from the legends of King Arthur, Durandal from the Song of Roland, and the famous (and infamous) blades of Masamune and Muramasa. Even now, swords keep creeping into pop culture, such as is the case with the artificial intelligence Cortana in the video game series Halo, who is named after a legendary sword in the Song of Roland, or the Hattori Hanzo swords of the action flick “Kill Bill.”

In this new series of articles, I hope to add to the magic of swords by showing how they can help one learn science. I’ll begin with the sound that swords make when they are swung.

Why care what sounds a sword makes? Flippantly, I might say they help the blind swordsman Zatoichi hear his enemies:

More seriously, I would say the sounds a sword makes can reveal whether or not it might cut through a target. A key goal in our style is achieving proper hasuji, or “edge line.” The sword’s edge should be the same angle as the sword’s cutting path. If the edge wobbles or tilts wrong as the sword is swung, the cut might not make it through a target.

Credit: Josh MacDonald

Credit: Josh MacDonald

You don’t need to swing at a solid target to know if you had good hasuji — the sound a sword can make when it is swung, known in Japanese as tachikaze, or “sword wind,” can serve as a sign. If the hasuji was right, tachikaze will sound like sharp whistling. If the hasuji was wrong, tachikaze will sound like flat whooshing, or there will be no tachikaze. Ideally, you should hear tachikaze from the beginning of a cut, when power is needed to begin slicing through a target.

Good hasuji sounds like this.
Bad hasuji, if you can hear it, might sound like this.

Why does the way a sword is swung lead to different sounds? To find out, I consulted aeroacoustician Ken Brentner, a professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University, who studies the sounds that aircraft make. After all, swords might resemble airplane wings in this matter.

When it comes to blades such as propellers, rotors or swords, Brentner explains there are two main kinds of noise they generate — “thickness noise” and “loading noise.”

Thickness noise occurs when air must essentially get out of the way of an oncoming blade and then reoccupy its original space once that blade has moved on. Thickness noise can get very large as a blade approaches the speed of sound.

Loading noise is generated when a blade acts directly on the surrounding air, generating forces that causes the air to speed up, slow down or change direction. Loading noise can originate from steady aerodynamic effects such as lift on a wing, or unsteady aerodynamic effects such as turbulence. Noise from unsteady loading is the dominant source of sounds from blades moving at relatively low speeds, “and is what I believe is the primary source of noise from swords,” Brentner says.

The secret of whistling tachikaze heard when hasuji is good might have to do with what are called Aeolian tones, Brentner says. These are named after Aeolus, the Greek ruler of the winds.

To explain, when air passes a cylinder, vortexes of air are shed from the top and the bottom of the cylinder in an alternating sequence with a very regular frequency. This pattern is known rather grandly as a von Karman vortex street.

“I believe this is what is happening when you hear the whistling sound when the blade is moving straight,” Brentner says. “What you hear is a tone, like what you might hear when wind is blowing over telephone wires. The reason it is a tone is because the unsteady loading noise is very regular — only at a few certain frequencies.” Since the back part of a katana is not tapered, “it would have a very similar vortex street, like a cylinder’s.”

However, when hasuji is bad, “I believe the flow over the blade is separating in a much more chaotic way — if it were an airfoil, we would say it is stalled,” Brentner says. “Thus it has a larger region of turbulent flow, which consists of a wide range of random-sized vortices or turbulent eddies.” Such turbulence “would generate a more whooshing sound, much like the sound you get from a cooling duct when the flow is coming out fast enough to hear it.”

In the below figures, you can see the turbulent eddies generated by deep stalls, which might approximate what one hears from bad hasuji, as well as the alternating vortices generated by blunt trailing edges, which might approximate what one hears from good hasuji.

The thickness of a sword and the geometry of its edge are also key factors regarding how easily a sword will generate tachikaze when swung. Intriguingly, the biggest factor behind tachikaze is whether or not a sword has a groove along its backside known as a bo-hi — swords with this groove are louder than swords without it. The blunt swords known as iaito that beginning students practice with typically have bo-hi, so the students can hear when they are getting hasuji right or wrong.

My iaito, with bo-hi visible along the backside.

Why does a bo-hi cause louder tachikaze? Brentner says this groove would shed vortices as air flowed over it. “This would potentially be as big a noise source as the vortex shedding from a blunt trailing edge, and the two might even couple to produce stronger unsteady loading and hence more sound,” he explains.

I hope you found the vortices that swords can generate interesting! More posts on the science of swords will be coming soon.

Dojo picture of me with sword.

Nature conspires with the sacred lotus to keep it clean and pure, a trick scientists hope to learn to protect everything from ship hulls to the latest fashions. The leaf of the lotus is covered with a wax that helps water roll off, taking any dirt along with it. Waxes and oils are water-repellant or “hydrophobic” materials, the fact underlying the dictum that oil and water don’t mix. Surface tension — the tendency of a surface of a liquid to resist an outside force — makes water naturally want to bead up into balls that can roll away.

The leaf of a lotus also possesses tiny bumps that boost its surface area, giving its wax more chances to repel water and making the leaf overall extremely water-repellant, or “superhydrophobic.” Superhydrophobicity is also what helps water strider insects tread on watery surfaces instead of falling through them.

Although superhydrophobic surfaces repel water, do they keep off ice as well? Not always. As Michael Nosonovsky and Vahid Hejazi at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee explain, the often-bumpy of superhydrophobic surfaces traps air pockets between the solid and the liquid. When water freezes, these air pockets become the basis of cracks in the ice, and the larger cracks are, the easier it is to dislodge ice off a surface.

So is this research worth pitching as a news story? Keep in mind that what each science reporter likes to write about can be idiosyncratic, so my choices might not be the choices another science reporter or you would make. Also, it bears saying — whether I pitch a story or not isn’t a judgment on whether I think the research is worthwhile, since my hope is that all research moves human knowledge forward. I’m focused on whether whatever audience I write for might be interested in reading about it.

Superhydrophobicity is a neat concept found everywhere in nature, such as bird feathers and beetle shells. Readers often like detailed explanations of how nature works, as long as its done in an interesting enough manner. Superhydrophobicity and icephobicity also have industrial applications — you don’t want ice building up on plane wings, do you? — so that helps ground this in the real world.

In the end, though, I think it’s too esoteric for a general audience to like. The research isn’t about superhydrophobicity or icephobicity, it’s about why one is not always the other. The explanation is not long enough to carry a story, or of wide enough interest — do people care whether or not a surface is both water-repellent and ice-repellent? A story might be possible if the researchers used their work to create a coating that was both superhydrophobic and supericephobic, but even then, it’ll be hard to sell to readers.

A lot of science is about exploring little mysteries and fascinating minutiae of nature, taking joy in the careful unraveling of how something works much as one would solving any puzzle. It’s difficult conveying that joy in the news sometimes — only the splashiest examples often work. It’s at least worth a reporter’s time to see if it’s possible.

*

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

This edition of Visions is written by Jesse Emspak, a freelance science writer in New York.

A biodegradable integrated circuit during dissolution in water. Credit: Beckman Institute, University of Illinois and Tufts University.

Joaquín Ibarra nodded as the catcher gave the sign — the fastball. He took a quick look towards the outfield.

The batter was crowding the plate. Ibarra decided to brush him back. His fastball wasn’t going to hit 98 mph but he would show this youngster who was boss today. As he threw, his a dull stab hit his shoulder.

“Ball four.”

And now there was one man on, two out, ninth inning. The umpire wasn’t giving him a ton of slack on the strike zone.

He could walk away. The closer was warming up in the bullpen, and Gary, his manager, was standing on the top step of the dugout — heck, the whole damned team was up there. The crowd was on its feet, too. They wanted to see him break Nolan Ryan’s record as the oldest to throw a no-hitter.

Ibarra’s elbow and shoulder burned. He’d had Tommy John surgery once, and shoulder problems as well. He had to rework his conditioning program after both. You can’t come back. You’re washed up.

The catcher called for a time out and he jogged up to the mound.

“Joaquín, you okay?”

“Dammit, Billy, I can do this.” He touched the charm he wore around his neck. It was just a torus of coral-colored stone he got in Cuba. He told his teammates that it was lucky.

“I feel you, Joaquín, but you don’t need to be a hero tonight. You need another minute?”

“No. Get back before the ump starts getting antsy.”

Ibarra fired his 110th pitch. Strike one looking. The next one he tried was the curve. He didn’t get a swing. Ball one.

He shook off the first sign, for the slider. And now I’m going to show those bastards.

The pain in his shoulder and elbow was gone. He set, and threw his sinker. The bat hit the ball with a crack, but it was a fast grounder straight towards third. The second baseman picked it up and fielded it to short for a perfect double play.

The crowd let out a roar. Billy ran up and gave him a bear hug. The rest of the team came to slap him on the back and congratulate him. Ibarra was 44 years and six months old. Take that, Nolan. I may never play in a World Series, I was never getting a Cy Young. But I have this and none of you can take it from me.

It wasn’t until a full month after the season ended that he saw his name in the news again. He picked up the phone and called Gary’s office.

“Gary, you see this?”

It was a list, attached to a story posted on the ESPN web site, showing how statistical analysis could ferret out steroid users when standard tests might not. He was on it. The article noted his career statistics — along with several other players — and said that his last year was an outlier. It might be the result of good conditioning, luck and talent. It might not.

Ibarra’s fastball velocity, it said, was up from the year before, and his strikeout rate was up. His ERA was down by a full half a run, from a pedestrian 4.08 — average for starters that year — to 3.56. And it compared that to his career numbers, which went from acceptable for a number three starter to pushing number one levels. The piece noted that he hadn’t had any disabled list time, either. And that he went to Cuba just before the start of the season.

“Joaquín, what does it matter now? You’re retired. Heck, you even got your performance incentive — what, couple of hundred thousand for making all 30 starts? Leave it alone.”

“You’ve known me for 15 years, Gary. Heck, I knew you when you were a goddamned player. You know I never did any of that stuff. I’ll even take a goddamned steroid test if they want. I didn’t need anything to make me a better pitcher.”

“I’m not judging you, Joaquín. I never have, and I stood by you even though you led the league in hit batters, even though they said you were head-hunting. Other people? That’s their problem.”

“I gave the game 20 years. More than that. I get lucky on one of my last starts and now I’m a cheater?”

“That isn’t what’s bothering you, Joaquín, and you know it.”

“I never juiced, Gary.”

“Then sue the guy for libel, Joaquín. But don’t hold your breath. Call me again if you want that coaching gig.”

The January sky was blue, puffy white clouds dotting the horizon. Ibarra leaned back into his deck chair, and sipped a beer. The condo faced the Pacific, and the terrace offered shade from the early afternoon sunlight. It was the dry season in Costa Rica, and he wasn’t expecting rain to mar the day.

He touched the charm around his neck. It didn’t do anything for him, not anymore.

It was hard to do things with just his left arm. But the docs said that the sling would be off in a week. So much for breaking Jamie Moyer’s record as the oldest guy to pitch in the majors.

Someone knocked on the door. Tamarindo was a long way from home, and he hadn’t told anyone where he was going. There was only one person it could be.

He opened the door. “Doctor Lopez,” he said. “Nice of you to drop by.”

“No trouble at all, Joaquín. After all I do enjoy this country, and I also like this resort. I like to talk to patients sometimes, too. Follow-up, if you will. Besides, getting in and out of Cuba is hard, and they aren’t the only country with a more… liberal, shall we say, view of experimental treatments. May I come in?”

Ibarra stood still for a full second, and then turned aside. “Have a seat. There’s beer in the fridge.”

Lopez helped himself to one and sat in a chair next to Ibarra’s. “So. How are things? Implants gone?”

“The docs here didn’t see a thing. They say my arm is pretty well shot, though.”

“Controlled release of cortisone, anti-inflammatories and painkillers, with the latter triggered by the remote around your neck. Understand, stopping pain isn’t the same as stopping injury. Your arm wasn’t going to take much more abuse, you know. That said, you didn’t miss a single start — quite the accomplishment. ”

“Yeah, well, I couldn’t go to the team docs, unless I hit the self-destruct and then I’m on the DL with no performance bonus.”

“Well, you knew that going in, Joaquín. I only promised you the ability to play out the season and reduce the pain. I told you the risks. I also offered the option of other release chemicals — most of which would be undetectable by tests for steroids — ”

“I told you then, I didn’t want to cheat. Stuff natural to the body only, or for the pain.”

Lopez sighed. “Cheating is such an ugly word. And I’ll ask you, Joaquín, if you felt what you did was right, why did you go all the way to Cuba to see me last year? Or is it just because you didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs that you think you’re innocent? Well then, if it makes you feel any better we got a load of great data. You have helped future players a lot, you know.”

Ibarra took a pull from his beer. “Wonderful. Give them my regards.”

Ibarra turned away from the doctor. Lopez got up and walked out.

He gazed at the ocean again, and pulled off the charm, breaking the chain. He squeezed it in his fist, hard. It wasn’t going to break. He knew that.

Ibarra threw it towards the water, onto the beach. He didn’t look for where it landed.

***

Most of the time we think of implants, and the electronics that go into them, as hard, rigid and permanent. But that may be changing. Some recent work from a team spread across the University of Illinois, Tufts University and Northwestern University has found a way to make electronics that dissolve into the body, leaving few traces.

How do they do it? It starts with spider silk and the fact that some elements do in fact dissolve — it just takes a long time. The key was making the electronics really, really thin — on the order of nanometers, or billionths of a meter — and giving them lots of surface area for them to dissolve into the surrounding solution.

For the semiconductors, the researchers used silicon coated in silk. Magnesium oxide went into the gates and magnesium for the electrodes. They also designed the silicon to have tiny pores, to give it more surface area. The combination of a tiny amount of material and a lot of surface area means the electronics get in contact with all those liquids — mostly water — in the body.

Of course you wouldn’t want your electronics dissolving prematurely, and that is what the silk is for. Thicker coatings of silk means the device lasts longer.

All this means that it’s possible to do all kinds of things that previously were done by permanent implants or ones that had to be removed. Norplant, for example, is an implanted contraceptive, but one still has to take it out eventually. A device like this could administer the hormones over a set period of time.

But the real advance is the fact that each of these devices has a brain. That means one could inject drugs at a specific moment, when they are needed. The electronics allow for monitoring their environment, so it would be quite possible to release whatever drug is necessary in response to certain stimuli. Since they are electronic devices, that also means they can transmit data, or receive it, opening the way to remote control. One possibility is stimulating muscles for physical therapy, or even the brain. Right now, brain stimulation is either done by literally sticking wires in your head or with devices that can’t stay in your skull forever.

As to surgery, John Rogers, one of the authors, noted that if you need this kind of device odds are you’re going in for surgery anyway.

It’s still going to be a while before we see this in humans — the tests so far were on mice. But it looks promising, as the devices were able to use heat to fight infections in surgical wounds. They also tested a tiny camera, though it isn’t much like a typical point-and-shoot. The electronics dissolved, leaving only faint traces.

There are still a lot of challenges. One is making sure the materials used don’t themselves cause infections or irritate tissues.

Even with those limits, though, it is worth asking if one day athletes who cheat might choose to have a small implant to pump the relevant drugs just before a race, say, and then have it disappear. With many performance-enhancing drugs there’s already an arms race between the anti-dopers and the dopers. The only reason many people are detected is random tests — but that often assumes one is taking the relevant drugs over long periods. Not every doping agent lasts for months; if one could take them without injections or pills, they’d be much harder to see.

Beyond biomedical applications though, is another that might be more important: electronics that don’t last forever. One of the big problems with current consumer devices is that they end up in landfills and stay there. The chemicals used to make them are often pretty toxic, and recycling them is expensive enough that there aren’t many places that do it. Electronics that even partially dissolved — for example, leaving behind only the glass screen — would go a way towards alleviating the problem.

You can email me regarding Visions at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Laser scanning of fossils to create 3-D models of them is becoming increasingly common. These models are key to computer simulations exploring how dinosaurs might have moved, and serve as the blueprints for replicas created using 3-D printers. Such 3-D printed fossils open up the possibility of 3-D printed dinosaur robots, a massive geek conjunction of lasers, dinosaurs and robots all in one package. More prosaically, the ability to hold a fossil in your hands can help paleontologists better imagine how bones of unknown species might fit together into skeletons.

An intriguing broadening of the possibilities of 3-D printing of fossils was raised by Matt Fedorko in a comment posted in a BoingBoing piece on a recent LiveScience article of mine about fossils of a bizarre new dinosaur with vampire-like fangs, a parrot beak and porcupine bristles. (Whew. That was a long sentence.)

My article talked about how these fossils remained trapped in blocks of rock in Harvard archives a half-century after they were first discovered. This is often the case in paleontology — scientists have excavated vast amounts of fossils still entombed within their original rocky matrix. It can paleontological technicians known as preparators months to years to properly remove all that matrix from bones, so it might take centuries to prep all the fossils currently stored in the lockers of some museums.

Instead of removing fossils from their matrices and then laser scanning them, why not try creating 3-D scans of them while they are still trapped within the rock? Imagine 3-D models of all these vast libraries of fossils placed online where students in schools all around the world might take a look at them either on their computers or as 3-D replicas.

Now, I’m not an imaging scientist, but I can already imagine how naive I sound to a professional. Figuring out what is fossil and what is not using, say, NMR or a CT scan is probably monumentally difficult, especially since you have one set of minerals, the fossilized material, surrounded by many other potentially very similar minerals. Even if 3-D scanners could distinguish fossils from their surroundings, it remains to be seen whether they could achieve high enough resolutions to be useful — microfossils and microscopic details on larger fossils are often key to understanding extinct life.

Still, the idea of creating dinosaur robots just by scanning blocks of rock is an enticing one…

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

By devising inflation theory, considered by many in physics to be the best explanation of why the universe currently looks the way it does, cosmologist Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology probably ranks among one of the most important physicists alive today. He suggested the cosmos expanded staggeringly in size a sliver of a second after it was born — a growth spurt that would help explain, among other things, why the universe is as extraordinarily uniform as it is today, with only very tiny fluctuations in how matter and energy are distributed.

For this achievement, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner decided to award Guth one of his new Fundamental Physics Prize this year, instantly making the physicist a multimillionaire. In writing a story on the Milner prize for NOVA, I came across an article in The New York Times the $3 million appeared in a bank account of Guth’s that only had $200. “Suddenly, it said, $3,000,200,” Guth said.

Why did Guth’s bank account only have $200?

A journalistic dictum is to “kill your babies” — to ruthlessly cut out anything that doesn’t serve the main thrust of your story, no matter how lovely. It’s a good rule to follow, helping to prevent florid digressions. But just because a detail doesn’t serve the main point of your story doesn’t mean it’s pointless — there are thousands of stories that end up on my figurative cutting room floor, answers to mysteries, glimpses of a larger world, items that regretfully often get tucked away in the electronic recesses of my computer to fade into digital obscurity.

Unless, say, I had a blog.

It turns out Guth wasn’t languishing in poverty before this jackpot. That $200 bank account wasn’t his main one. It was just one he happened to have. Since Guth didn’t know whether the guy who called him over the phone claiming to be a Russian billionaire who wanted to give him $3 million was for real or not, Guth cautiously gave him details to a relatively expendable account and waited to see what happened. I’d wager he was rather happy with the result.

The bad thing about writing for others for a living is there are stories no one else would really care to pay to run. The good thing about writing for yourself is that you only have to really answer to yourself.

You can email me regarding From The Writer’s Desk at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Today I began my brief tenure at ScholarCast at Scitable, Nature’s portal for science education. My first post was on how I managed to dig up a story from research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which raises a long-standing quibble of mine — what’s up how it publicizes its papers?

To explain, science journalism typically focuses on major journals such as Nature, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These journals each give journalists who have written at least three stories for major news outlets what is known as embargo access, a sneak peak at papers about a week before they are formally published. This lead time is supposed to give reporters time to ask scientists questions about their work, since science is seen as a trickier to cover than, say, a school board meeting. Publishing a story on embargoed research before its embargo date and time can suspend that writer’s embargo access for weeks to months, which is why people generally don’t violate embargo.

Reporters who have embargo access to these journals typically get an email from each of them every week. This email highlights about six to 12 items, giving paragraph-long press releases on them. Reporters are also given links to embargoed papers, contact information for researchers, and links to images, video and audio if appropriate.

The thing is, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publishes more than six to 12 articles a week — more like 70. That means plenty of articles do not get highlighted, ones that may very well be newsworthy.

As a freelancer, this is actually good for me. The journals typically have password-protected sites for reporters with embargo access. I go to the site PNAS has, look at the rest of the papers, and find newsworthy items other journalists overlook. This is pretty much how freelancers are supposed to make a living, and really, all journalists — finding news that others miss. This week I ended up writing one such story on bonobo stone tool use. I know Ed Yong‘s gotten scoops this way as well.

Although I really should try and keep this backdoor a secret, since I profit from it, there’s a certain nagging sense of civic duty that wants everybody to have a fair chance at reporting newsworthy research; that wants interesting and important research to reach a wider audience instead of languishing in obscurity. There’s really a very simple thing PNAS can do — in their email to journalists, simply provide the titles of all the articles they’re publishing that they’re not highlighting. This is what Nature and Science do, after all. It’s a simple, no-cost solution.

I’ve tried raising this with PNAS’ news staff, but they just don’t seem to understand. Shrug.

Addendum: The PNAS News Office contacted me and let me know that at the bottom of their weekly email, they include a link to a page on their site for reporters where all their embargoed papers are listed by subject. This is the very page I visit each week when I want to look at more than just their highlighted papers. Some papers are redundantly listed under multiple subjects, which can be a minor frustration to peruse, but it’s served me and others well enough when it comes to mining the page for stories. The PNAS News Office said it met last year with a panel of more than 10 staff writers from Science News, Science, The New York Times, NPR and others last year. “Among other questions, we asked whether they would prefer a list of 60-80 articles at the end of the Tipsheet, or a simple link to the list on EurekAlert. All of them said they would prefer a link,” the PNAS News Office told me.

I can understand this was the recommendation they received and acted upon, but I nevertheless think it’s a mistake. Not listing all the other articles might be slightly more pleasing to the eye for reporters, but reporters should really overcome minor inconveniences in their job to let their readers know of science that deserves wider recognition.

Note: this article has been corrected since the time of its initial posting to reflect the fact that PNAS publishes 60 to 80 papers a week, not 20 as I originally stated.

You can email me regarding From The Writer’s Desk at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Me and my colleagues want to hear today from you, our readers, following Ed Yong’s lead. Why don’t you introduce yourselves in the comments section?

1) Tell me about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.

2) Tell someone else about this blog and in particular, try and choose someone who’s not a scientist but who you think might be interested in the type of stuff found in this blog. Ever had family members or groups of friends who’ve been giving you strange, pitying looks when you try to wax scientific on them? Send ‘em here and let’s see what they say.

3) I’m interested in whether you found us, or regularly follow us, through Twitter, Facebook and-or other beyond-RSS mechanisms that you may use to corral your information stream.

Mobile devices are unquestionably more powerful than PCs of a generation ago. However, desktop and laptop computers still remain useful because of their peripherals, such as monitors, keyboards and mice or touchpads — their equivalents on mobile devices are far smaller and crammed together, greatly limiting their utility.

Attaching peripherals onto mobile devices typically adds bulk, thus sacrificing the virtues of having a handheld device to begin with. Ideally, one wants a peripheral that greatly increases the input and output capacities of mobile devices while taking up as little amount of space as possible.

I’ve argued that electronic glasses combined with a virtual floating keyboard would accomplish just this. The glasses would display a screen and a virtual keyboard, have sensors that could detect where your fingertips are, and wirelessly communicate data to and from your mobile device.

I first proposed the idea with the Microsoft Kinect sensor, but its resolution is not really good enough to pick up the subtle finger motions needed to make a virtual keyboard work. However, San Francisco-based Leap Motion recently debuted the Leap gesture-based computer interaction system, a USB device roughly the size of a pocket knife that can recognize the differences between finger gestures, apparently tracking movements down to 1/100th of a millimeter, far more precise than the Kinect.

I’ve also thought about the possibilities suggested by Touché by Disney Research, which can sense the way an object is held, even the human body. In principle, one can have wristbands that detect the way in which your hands and fingers are felt, which could also lead to a virtual keyboard. My problem with that idea is that you’d still want electronic glasses to see the virtual keyboard with, so why not use the Leap device?

Hopefully we’ll hear serious discussion about incorporating the Leap or other next-generation Kinect-like device with electronic glasses soon.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

Meditation is often thought to help expand the mind, opening up the limits of consciousness. Now research suggests that meditation can indeed help one keep an open mind, preventing people from falling into mental traps that prolong problem-solving, findings appearing in the journal PLoS ONE. So is this worth pitching?

The research is rooted in experiments based on something with the intriguing name of the Einstellung water jar task. Einstellung literally means “attitude” in German — in this case, it refers to the creation of a mechanized state of mind, a propensity to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there may be better ways of solving the problem. Think of the saying, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

So, the experiment. Volunteers were first shown three jars on a computer screen, labeled A, B and C. Each jar was marked as capable of holding a specific amount of water. The participants had to pour a specific amount of water into a cup by using these three jars with the simplest, shortest solution possible.

At first the participants were given a task where the problem was best solved with jars A, B and C given the strategy B minus A minus 2C. This was later changed so that they could solve the problem with the strategy B minus A minus 2C, or more simply with either the strategy A plus C or A minus C.

The participants in this experiment included 12 volunteers with at least three years each of experience in Vipassana meditation, as well as 15 people with no meditation experience. The researchers found that experienced meditators were significantly more able to switch strategies than people without meditation experience.

In another experiment, scientists took 64 participants with no meditation experience and randomly split these participants into two groups of equal size, one of which was given six weeks of meditation training, the other not. Two months afterward, those who received meditation training were significantly more able to switch strategies on the water jar task than those who did not. This kind of experiment helps show that meditation appears responsible for this effect, as opposed to, say, whatever factors might drive one to seek meditation in the first place.

So how might meditation training help avoid rigid, myopic thinking? The researchers note that meditation training often stresses avoiding reliance on past experiences and living in the present. Past research on meditation suggests it can help people switch perspectives, thus cultivating a kind of mental flexibility.

What good might this research serve? The researchers speculate that an ability to see alternative solutions to problems could be helpful in a number of arenas — from physicians making correct diagnoses to suicidal people seeing a way out of the problems that bedevil them.

This research has a lot going for it in to get picked up as news, in my opinion. The research seems solid, and shows how people can alter their minds in surprising, beneficial ways. The experiments are neat — puzzle-solving seems to me to be a good way to involve audiences. And it fits into a wider context of meditation research, which has attracted increasing attention, due in no small part to luminaries such as the Dalai Lama supporting such work.

So do I think this story is worth pitching? You bet. In fact, I’ve pitched it to four different news outlets before it got picked up.

It still puzzles me as to why so many places turned it down at first. I think it’s interesting — clearly, if I’ve pitched it four times. What we have here is an interesting example of what I think is a newsworthy story, coupled with a clear difficulty in getting it accepted. At first the editor who did accept the story was reticent, but she told me she did in fact find it really interesting once she started editing it.

Maybe the story got turned down because there’s been a glut of work showing the benefits of meditation? Or maybe it’s because meditation is seen as a kind of touchy-feely practice that might smell like quackery to some?

Why do you think this pitch took so long to get picked up? I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

So last month Google unveiled What’s-the-Score, a project funded by a Google award where Oxford’s main research library digitized a set of 4,000 popular piano pieces from the mid-Victorian period and made it available online. By visiting the Web site, “citizen librarians” can describe the scores, and link to audio or video recordings.

That’s neat. Unfortunately, I can’t read music, and so the qualities of this music will be mostly lost on me. But what, I wonder, if there was a way for Google to automatically play the music out loud for my listening pleasure?

You’d feed what I call Google Autopiano a piece of online sheet music, and it’d play it out loud for you, just like a player piano. You can change the instrument you use to play the music like you can on an electronic keyboard, so it can play harpsichord, guitar, flute, and so on.

In many ways, this is like Google Translate. You’re taking a piece of text that might not be understood by many people and translating it to a version anyone can understand.

The main obstacle would be what I think is a lack of standard electronic sheet music formats. Still, there certainly is software that can scan and render sheet music into digitally playable forms. If Google can scan books en masse and make them readable to the general public, it’d be interesting if a Google sheet music project could scan volumes of sheet music and make songs that might have been neglected for centuries available to new listeners.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

I’m working on a science book, and I’m kind of terrified of the prospect. I’m used to writing 500- to 1,000-word stories, not 80,000-word books. A good strategy when facing any new problem is to use what skills you have, and I know how to question the bejesus out of people. With that in mind, I figure authors of science books probably work at least somewhat like writers of science news, although they might ask different questions.

As such, as a contributor to The Open Notebook, an excellent nonprofit that seeks to tell the stories behind the best science stories, I quizzed six science authors about what questions they might ask that the average science journalist might not. You can read that article at this link as well as below.

Thanks very much to The Open Notebook for letting me repost this!

Deborah Blum, author most recently of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Aside from the obvious things — the difference in rhythm, and pacing, and depth — is that writing books really became my laboratory for thinking about narrative writing. Mostly that’s because when you are writing a narrative book, you find yourself obsessed with how to structure it — how many story lines do I have, how many characters, how many points of view? How do I weave those together? Rebecca Skloot talks about this in her “braided narrative” discussion of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

If you look at The Poisoner’s Handbook, you’ll see that it actually has two different internal structures. One is the chronological narrative of two crusading scientists. The other is an actual handbook of poisons, with every chapter focusing on a different toxic compound or element. And woven through that is the story of the Prohibition era.

All of this has influenced the way I teach writing. For instance, in my magazine writing classes, I always require my students to write using different structures on their blogs — a zipper narrative, a diamond-shaped narrative — so that they can start thinking early about the art of craft of story structure.

*

David Dobbs, author most recently of Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral and writer of features and essays for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired, the Guardian and others.

The questions I ask when writing a book are of two kinds.

First, I ask all the kinds of questions I’d ask writing an article on the same subject — very much the sorts of questions you’ve outlined in your article at Scientific American [CQC: which you can read here].

Second, over months and months I ask another huge string — a pile, a truckload, a Nile of questions — that are hard to characterize outside the context of a particular project. Why? Because these additional questions usually follow from the answers to the first line of questions. Their entire point is to get past that first layer to other, deeper, hidden layers — to many, many., many details about the science (90% of which I won’t use), as well as details and background and motivations of the people in the book (ditto).

I tend to write about science that is pushing the edge of evidence — it involves tensions that I feel are at the heart of science and reveal a lot about why both humankind and individual people get into science. When I wrote about such arguments taking place in the 19th century, I could know how the argument turned out, and getting the science right was relatively easy. It’s a lot harder when writing about cutting-edge science being done today. I’m not here to adjudicate who’s right; that’s not my call — it’s history’s. But I need to understand the science — science that confuses and confounds and divides researchers — well enough to get a sense of how far the more aggressive people are leaning out over the evidence. That’s the tension I’m after, and to know it I need to see all the strands. This is hard, if you’re doing it right, and of course the science is advancing as I study it. It’s a bit crazy.

Anyway, that same difficulty produces tension in the scientists’ lives, and to get that I need to ask them a lot of questions. I ask them questions about the science and about themselves to the point of them getting sick of me, in some cases beyond. I ask questions that seem to have nothing to do with anything — this seems to bother scientists particularly — and I ask questions that I’ve asked before. I do that partly because I may get more information and partly because their thinking might change. (Just last week, someone told me, “Actually I have changed my thinking a bit on that.”) And I want to know them as people, and that takes a lot of questions, both direct and indirect, about where and how they grew up and how they got started and other questions it’s better to keep to myself for now.

Take all that together and you can see why it’s hard to name particular questions I’d ask in a book that I wouldn’t for an article; it’s like predicting what you’d be talking about 20 days into a 400-day conversation. It gets detailed. It gets personal. It gets repetitive and also, sometimes because it’s repetitive, it goes places you don’t expect. The questions can seem weird taken out of context.

But they’re also fun. So here are a few questions that I’ve asked various people just over the last month, for instance, as I work on my book about the genetics of temperament. These come from different parts of different interviews; no two shown consecutively here were asked in any given interview.

Is that a real skull?

So just how full of shit are they — like, completely?

How many monkeys we talking about?

Is that thing poisonous?

These guys jump out of airplanes at night at 10,000 feet into combat, and they’re scared to swim?

In what sense is the science getting too far in front of itself?

Would a really big canoe impress you?

So in three months he went from being a disorganized jerk to a focused machine. What changed?

What do you mean when you say you still feel a ‘”cautiously optimistic vaguely skeptical pessimism?”

How did she do it?

So is gene expression a downstream trait — or is it the stream?

I want to make sure I have this: the frogs with the longest legs migrated farthest and fastest, to make a migratory wave-front; mated with other long-legged frogs at the front; and so over generations the frogs at the front became even more longer-legged. Right?

Five minutes ago you said geneticists don’t like to talk about ‘why’ — but you just did. Why?

Wait: The truck actually took you all the way from Ohio to Miami, then broke down at the end of the exit ramp? Like the very end?*

These are the kinds of questions I get to ask. This is one of many reasons I love my job — and why it’s often hard, especially when writing a book, to stop asking questions and write the damned book. You know there’s more gold out there — and all you have to do to get it is ask the right question.

*The guy whose truck broke down, by the way, said it did indeed break down at the very end of the exit ramp, and he rented an apartment in a rundown apartment house right by the exit ramp and carried his stuff over. The answers to the other questions, in order, were (usually paraphrasing): Yes; Completely; 49; Not any more; Some of them are; It’s complicated; Definitely; “He grew up.”; “Just what it sounds like.”; [Too distressing to relate here]; Both; Right; I didn’t.

*

Matthew Hutson, author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane and onetime news editor at Psychology Today.

One question that I pushed myself to answer while writing my book about magical thinking was, “How has writing this book changed me?” (One answer that I offered in the epilogue was that without sacrificing my skepticism, I’ve tempered my cynicism.) This is not the type of question you normally ask yourself when writing a blog post or news story, and often not even while writing a feature. But when you give your life over to an investigation for a period of years, it’s going to change you. And the reader wants to know how the journey has affected the narrator, who to some degree is also the protagonist.

*

Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of Before The Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us and science editor of BoingBoing.net.

Here are some suggestions for good questions:

a) Who are the main characters in this story? What happens to them?

You can write a non-fiction book that is mostly polemic, if you want. And you can write a non-fiction book that is really a collection of mostly unconnected essays. But those books aren’t as enjoyable to read as a book that tells a story through the eyes of a character. Basically, you don’t just want to write a book, you want to tell a story. And to do that, you have to ask yourself some questions about what the key narrative events are and whose journey this is going to be.

b) Why does this topic need to be a book?

Not everything does. When I read non-fiction books that are dull or tedious or that don’t feel like somebody telling me a story, it’s usually because the author had something important to say, but didn’t need 85,000+ words and a storytelling format to explain it to me. You will have some key points that you’ll have to make — if your book had an “executive summary,” this would be it. But there should be something going on beyond that executive summary material. There should be a reason for me to read the whole book, not just the executive summary. Asking, “Why do I need to write a book about this topic, as opposed to a long feature, or a short feature,” is a really good place to start.

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Maryn McKenna, author most recently of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, blogger for Wired and columnist and contributing editor for Scientific American.

I transitioned from being a newspaper reporter to writing books and magazine pieces, and shortly afterward, blog posts as well. The most important questions for me were, “What do you uniquely bring to this subject, and what do you have to say about it that can’t be said by someone else?” These were hard questions for me to contemplate, because as a straight news reporter I’d been trained to not offer an opinion, in fact to keep myself out of the story as much as possible. I had to learn that, to make a book worth a reader’s time, I had to go beyond straight news reporting into interpretation and, I guess, active curation — that is, letting the reader into my POV and making my thought process visible. I still struggle with this.

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Carl Zimmer, author most recently of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed and writer for The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, Science and Popular Science, among others.

I guess the one big question I ask with a book is “What is the history of this story? There isn’t space in a news piece to get into history, which is unfortunate, since the effect is an impression that new scientific research just pops out of the void. It’s much more interesting to trace the whole saga, and books provide the space in which to do so.

You can email me regarding From The Writer’s Desk at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

The stories you read often seem the sole work of the writer named in the byline. In reality, stories often go through many incarnations as part of a collaboration between the writer of a story and the editors who represent what their readers want and need.

Here I share with you the first and published versions of “Herding Schrodinger’s Cats,” my first story for NOVA’s physics blog “The Nature of Reality,” as well as my comments on revisions. Hopefully you’ll find them interesting.

I would recommend first reading my first version, then the published version, and then compare them side-by-side with my comments. “The Nature of Reality” is very conversational in tone, so you will get to see how my voice as a writer gets revised to also fit the voice of the blog. Also, since this is my first piece for “The Nature of Reality,” you will get to see how a story from a writer new to a publication can get revised to fit the storytelling needs of that publication.

Much thanks to PBS for allowing me the opportunity to do this!

The fossil amoeba Hemiarcherella christellae. Credit: Girard Vincent, Paleontology.

So here’s a tidbit that caught my eye the other day — “Fossil amoebae (Hemiarcherellidae fam. nov.) from Albian (Cretaceous) amber of France.” Ancient, protean microbes, discovered frozen in time — tantalizing.

Fossils are typically worth a look. Amoebae as well. I’ve never heard of fossil amoebae, so there’s novelty there that might be worth investigating — the operative word in “news,” after all, is “new.” Trapped in amber, these delicate microbes appear extraordinarily well-preserved, so there’s potentially an attractive visual.

The amoebae in question are testate — that is, they generate tests, or shells. So they’re not blobs, as one might normally think of amoebae, but rather had a rod-like, translucent shell from which projected a ring of about a dozen spike-like filopodia that likely acted much like whiskers. These shells were about 55 microns long — about half the width of a human hair — and 17 microns wide.

The researchers propose this is a new family of amoeba — they call it Hemiarcherellidae, ‘Hemi’ for ‘half’ and ‘Archerella’ for the name of the closest genus of amoebae resembling it physically. The one they describe here is Hemiarcherella christellae, whose species epithet Christellae is derived from the researcher’s ex-wife Christelle. (I hesitate to ask what’s going on there.)

The researchers suggest H. christellae lurked in the soil, sneaking around crevices hunting bacteria. In turn, it may have been preyed on by mites, juvenile spiders or springtails — what to it would have been giant bug-eyed monsters.

So is this research worth pitching? Keep in mind that what each science reporter likes to write about can be idiosyncratic, so my choices might not be the choices another science reporter or you would make. Also, it bears saying — whether I pitch a story or not isn’t a judgment on whether I think the research is worthwhile, since my hope is that all research moves human knowledge forward. I’m focused on whether whatever audience I write for might be interested in reading about it.

Well, to start with, this discovery represents the third species of fossil testate amoebae discovered from amber. So it’s not a new discovery, per se.

Most science is incremental, and valuably so. Like a coral reef, a great deal of science’s beauty lies in steady accumulation. Many readers, even scientists, are often attracted to the flash of novelty, but a lot of the real work is with pieces of the puzzle that help shed light on the big picture such as this one.

How does this research change what we knew before about the world? It adds to the fossil record of amoebae, and so helps yield insights on their evolution. Did they change over time? Or have they remained largely static?

Unfortunately, for the audiences I typically write for, morsels of natural history such as this aren’t what I think grab their attention. I could be wrong, though, and gladly welcome others to pitch this research. In any case, the value of blogs such as this one is that I can highlight whatever I please, especially work that might otherwise go overlooked.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

On my last post on pitching, regarding a throwaway paragraph on intelligent alien dinosaurs, a commenter and fellow Scientific American blogger did note that the author of that paper, Ron Breslow, is a very highly respected scientist, and wondered why any reporters who wrote about the intelligent alien dinosaur comment didn’t simply interview him to find out what it meant.

So yes, Ron Breslow is a very respected scientist, and a former president of the American Chemical Society to boot. He’s very far from a quack, and should not be dismissed as such. Why didn’t any reporters contact him for his side of the story?

This is a question with a complex set of answers. I’ll offer my own views, and freely admit there are many arguments one could make regarding this issue, which people can discuss themselves in the comment section.

In my opinion, as I said in my last post, I don’t think this shouldn’t have been written about at all. It appeared in a scientific paper, but I don’t think it’s meant to be considered a scientific comment — it’s not supposed to be thought of as an argument backed by evidence.

Any stories that one writes about this are then about the culture of science. Should the scientist have put those statements in there or not? Should the press officers have emphasized that statement or not?

What usually ends up happening is that you mostly end up expressing opinions. Some people liked the flight of fancy; others found it ridiculous. That’s exactly what happened in this situation.

Do you then go and gather opinions, including an interview with Breslow? As far as I can tell, most writers didn’t. My feeling is that they didn’t feel the issue warranted the extra effort. It barely warranted the effort of writing an opinion about it — again, my opinion is that it didn’t really even warrant an article at all. Also, by going around and asking others about their opinions on a throwaway comment, are you just conjuring a tempest in a teapot, making more of an issue than is strictly necessary?

Also, I’m not sure what interviewing Breslow would actually get you, other than a story that further embarrasses Breslow. I’d imagine the interview might go something like: “Maybe you shouldn’t have wrote that?” “Yes.” “Do you feel silly writing that now?” “Perhaps.” “Would you say in retrospect that you might have expressed poor judgment?” “Perhaps.” It’s not professional as a journalist to avoid an interview simply to avoid further hurting someone’s feelings, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

There was an astonishing press release on April 11 entitled “Could ‘Advanced’ Dinosaurs Rule Other Planets?” The first paragraph proclaimed “advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs — monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans — may be the life forms that evolved on other planets in the universe.” (The full text of the press release can be read here.)

So there seems like there’s a lot to like here for lay audiences. Not just dinosaurs, but intelligent alien dinosaurs! In addition, the press release was based on a paper ran in the very well-respected Journal of the American Chemical Society, so there’s a prestigious journal backing this up.

Now, if you’re guessing I stayed away from this as if it was the plague, you’d have guessed right. Tellingly, the American Chemical Society has yanked the press release from its site, and the paper as well — yikes.

So what was the paper actually on? The very simple phenomenon of chirality. Just as human hands come in left and right varieties, so do many molecules. This handedness property is known as chirality, which is derived from the Greek word for hand. I’ve written about chirality before (forgive the odd typo at the beginning of the fourth paragraph — it’s not in my original draft), and there are very interesting scientific questions as to why, say, all terrestrial life uses only right-handed sugars (so-called D-sugars) and left-handed amino acids (so-called L-amino acids).

From what I can tell, the paper was relatively sedate. However, it then veers sharply into left field at the very end:

“An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars, depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe or whatever other process operated to favor the L α‐methyl amino acids in the meteorites that have landed on Earth. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.”

I can only assume this was meant to be received tongue-in-cheek. In any case, there’s not really any new science here to write a story on.

What did happen was journalistic focus on how bizarre the entire flight of fancy was. One roundup of stories is here at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, a good place to keep abreast of science journalism in general. Others who wrote about the hullabaloo included Brian Switek at Smithsonian.com and Eoin O’Carroll at the Christian Science Monitor.

Of course, the Daily Mail in the UK apparently bought this argument hook, line and sinker. That should tell you quite a bit about the Daily Mail, if you didn’t know it already.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

So trepanation, also known as trephination, is a fancy way of saying, “surgically punching a hole in the skull.” That’s what originally drew my eye to “Evidence of Trephinations among the Garamantes, a Late Holocene Saharan Population.”

Reading the paper, I find that the Garamantians, who once lived in southwest Libya, apparently practiced trepanation, the first time the operation has been seen in ancient times in the Sahara. The Garamantians, named after their capital, Garama, flourished in the harsh central Sahara for nearly 1,500 years between 1,000 BC and 700 AD. They introduced key innovations to the region, including cities, irrigated farming, trade across the Sahara and a hierarchical, probably slave-owning society.

All three trepanned skulls the researchers wrote about belonged to Garamantians who apparently survived the surgery, given the presence of newly formed bone in these holes. This suggests the Garamantians had “knowledge of complex surgical procedures,” the researchers wrote.

So that is all well and good. Sounds like enough for a pitch, no? You have an unnerving surgical procedure, a first example of this in (what is to us) a remote area, a lost civilization in the desert, and intriguing history regarding this lost civilization.

The problem is that it’s very brief. Your average science news story is about 400 to 500 words long. The finding itself can be summed up in 150 words or so.

It’s possible to expand this story. You can talk about the fascinating history of trepanation — how it is arguably the oldest known medical operation in history; how it was not only used for medicine, but also magic, to release evil spirits. If you go and interview the researcher, you can ask about the significance of this finding — although the paper does not discuss this, perhaps it hints at cultural exchanges across north Africa, from Morocco to Egypt. You can also ask for bits of color about the dig — how hard it was to work in the hot sun, the kind of details that immerse readers in the practice of archaeology.

Still, the fascinating history of trepanation only can go so long, and the other bits are speculative. Maybe the researcher won’t talk about whether or not this has greater significance, preferring a more conservative interpretation. Perhaps the skulls were excavated by someone else decades ago, and the researchers are examining museum specimens. You might find that you pitched a story only to do the reporting and find that you don’t have enough to write about. It would be great if you could write about what the trepanation was used for, but the paper does not speculate along those lines.

At the end of the day, other than pointing out that these are novel instances of trepanation, the paper does not say these findings are any greater than that. That’s kind of hard to base a story on, or even a brief 150 words long.

What saves this, however, is that there was another find in the same issue of the journal, “Like You Need a Hole in the Head: Tool Innovation a Possible Cause of Trephination. A Case from Kerma, Nubia.”

Archaeologists apparently also discovered the first confirmed case of trepanation in ancient Nubia — specifically, the ancient Nubian kingdom of Kerma. The close proximity and interaction of the ancient Nubians with their more prominent neighbors and rivals, the ancient Egyptians, have led to the notion that Nubians copied the traditions of the ancient Egyptians, but this new find suggests the Nubians may have surpassed the Egyptians in some areas of technology and medicine.

Now you have two discoveries of trepanation in areas of Africa where it was not known before. Moreover, you have a second lost civilization, and history to discuss.

These two finds buttress each other, and so I pitched it. Stringing together multiple recent findings can be a good way to build an article — in Lost Giants: Did Mammoths Vanish Before, During and After Humans Arrived?, I wove together three studies that apparently disagreed with each other as to when mammoths, saber-toothed cats and other North American megafauna disappeared.

The story on trepanning ran as Lost Civilizations That Pioneered Skull Surgery in io9.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Regarding pitching stories, here are two pitches of mine that became stories in The New York Times, which recently appeared in The Open Notebook, a site that seeks to tell the story behind the best science stories. You can compare and contrast the pitches and the final published stories to see how the pitches expanded and altered during the editing process.

When it came to “At Trading Crossroads, Permafrost Yields Siberian Secrets” (pitch here), there’s a funny story here. I pitched this story on Siberian mummies at the end of 2002 to the science editor at the Times at the time, and she accepted, on the reasonable condition that I get a photo of the mummies to accompany the story. The article then languished for nearly a year because the Russian researcher didn’t send over a photo. I finally went to Russia to shoot pictures of the mummies (an ordeal in itself, involving buying a visa, flying into a snowstorm, and a government escort to a vodka bar and Scottish ballet) only to find out the mummies had been moved back to Siberia. However, the researchers did have a CD-ROM of pix of the mummies, which raises two questions: a) Why not just send me the CD-ROM instead of me flying out? b) If they’re files on the CD-ROM, why not just email me the pix? Still, the trip was worth it, as a lot of matters were best discussed with the researchers face to face, given my non-existent Russian and their good but imperfect English. This pitch is unusually long — I was still feeling out the Times at that point, and I was nervous pitching to the Times, being only in my second year as a freelance.

For “Looking This Way and That, and Learning to Adapt to the World” (pitch here), the pitch on this piece for the Times was much shorter than my pitch on Siberian mummies, and is of the usual length of my pitches for them now. I figure you want about four paragraphs of story to start with, to show that you have storytelling chops and that there’s an article worth investigating there. I then give a paragraph explicitly selling why this story works for readers. The two paragraphs after the asterisk are replies to the editor on questions as to how timely this research is, what has been published on it, and unique scientific findings associated with the work.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

So here’s research I mulled over pitching for a while, entitled “The Effect of Linkedin on Deception in Resumes.”

LinkedIn is basically Facebook for business. You can post your resume there, link to colleagues and friends, and develop networks. A lot of professionals use it, including me (shameless plug). So you have an interesting readership you might reach with this story — professionals who use LinkedIn.

You also want to attract reader attention with words such as “deception.” Skullduggery’s afoot! People lie on resumes — shocker! These liars might be getting the job you want! Maybe you should lie too?

So this story might have a certain broad appeal. However, I decided against pitching it. Why didn’t I pitch it? In the end, it boils down to audiences, and who I write for.

Each news outlet has a unique audience it wants to reach. The subject, tone, reporting and length that makes up a story depends on this audience.

I write for a bunch of different news outlets — Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, LiveScience and others. I can’t quite find myself pitching this story to any of them. What is the story? The kind of deception you use with online resumes differs with traditional resumes? Too specialized for the outlets I typically write for. I might aim for a story that says that deception online differs from deception in print, but that seems like it might overreach into bad, irresponsible journalism.

I’m sure, however, there’s a news outlet somewhere that can run this — a business news site, for instance. You are free to pitch it yourself, mind you.

Keep in mind that what each science reporter likes to write about can be idiosyncratic, so my choices might not be the choices another science reporter or you would make. Also, it bears saying — whether I pitch a story or not isn’t a judgment on whether I think the research is worthwhile, since my hope is that all research moves human knowledge forward. I’m focused on whether whatever audience I write for might be interested in reading about it.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.