I think we’re NOT alone now

Posted on 7 Mar, 2017 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Finding new and engaging ways to communicate science is of paramount importance. But, how many opportunities are there to practice the art of communication?
When can we try out different methods of distilling science?
It seems that these chances are relatively rare considering clear communication is something for which we all strive.
I was given carte blanche to develop my first course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.I decided to fill a gap in the grad student curriculum and test run a scicomm course. As I was developing and teaching the course, I wondered how many other science communication courses were out there.
It’s not to say there aren’t opportunities. There’s fellowships, such as workshops at AAAS, but they seemed somewhat out of reach to the regular undergrad or grad student working on their degree.
Books, such as Nancy Baron’s Escape from the Ivory Tower, are also available, but when can you practice what these books preach, regardless of your career stage?
In the fall of 2016, my students and I would either sink or swim together.
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Posted in blogging, career, community, interview, science publishing | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Why science cannot help but be political

Posted on 3 Mar, 2017 by Jeremy Yoder

The Smithsonian Institution’s “castle” in Washington, DC. (Flickr: Robert Lyle Bolton)


What does it mean to say that science is political?
I’ve been contemplating that question since long before November 9, 2016, but it’s gained a great deal more urgency in the light of the current U.S. presidential administration. It’s also been a surprising focus of conversations around the March for Science. It’s mildly astonishing, to me, that serious people think scientific work could be separate from politics in the best of times, and the idea that it might still be is absurd. Science as we know it could not exist apart from politics, and scientific work is inextricably important for political discourse.
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An Update on the Great BAMM Controversy

Posted on 1 Mar, 2017 by Ethan Linck

Update, 01 August 2016, 2:50PM. This post has been updated to include information contained in the supplemental material of Rabosky et al. 2017, and clarify the difference between branch-specific and tree-wide rate variation.
Back in August, I summarized the main points of a debate over the
reliability of the popular macroevolutionary modeling program BAMM. At the time,
critics Moore et al. (hereafter “MEA”) had published a high profile paper in PNAS arguing that several
crucial aspects of BAMM’s implementation and theoretical underpinnings
hindered its ability to accurately estimate diversification rates. Though the paper stimulated a vigorous online debate, a formal rebuttal from the program’s developers Rabosky et al. (hereafter “REA”) did not appear until this week, published early access in Systematic Biology.
Before getting to the major takeaways of REA’s response, a quick cautionary note: like many scientific discussions that blossom over the internet, the debate over BAMM has involved both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed dimensions. While blog posts from both MEA and REA are useful to understand different perspectives on the issue at hand, it’s important to understand that these dialogues are on essentially parallel tracks — and so the failure to discuss a particular online critique in a published paper should not be taken to mean that the authors have nothing to say on the topic if the argument has not yet been made in the peer reviewed literature. (REA have themselves stated they will only respond to peer reviewed critiques going forward.) For the purposes of this update, I’ve focused only what has been presented in the PNAS and Systematic Biology papers, but I would encourage users of the program to read both REA’s initial rebuttal on the BAMM website and MEA’s in-depth posts on the Treethinkers blog.
With that out of the way, here’s where things stand.
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Posted in blogging, evolution, methods, phylogenetics, science publishing, software, speciation | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How much wood would a termite chuck…if it was missing its microbial symbionts

Posted on 24 Feb, 2017 by Kelle Freel

Termites get a pretty bad rap, probably because we think of our houses disintegrating when they move in. Ironically, we have a lot to learn from these critters, and their mounds have served as an inspiration for modern architecture. Either way… maybe, just maybe, after learning more about them, you will appreciate how interesting they are.
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Posted in Coevolution, evolution, genomics, microbiology | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Friday Action Item: Visit a natural history museum

Posted on 24 Feb, 2017 by Jeremy Yoder

The great hall of the Field Museum, in Chicago. (Flickr: jby)


On Fridays while the current administration is in office we’re posting small, concrete things you can do to help make things better. Got a suggestion for an Action Item? E-mail us!
This weekend, take a break from the news, if you can, and get out of the house. In a lot of the U.S., it’s still not a time of the year when the best way to get out of the house is just to go outdoors. Let me suggest, instead, that you visit the nearest natural history museum.
I don’t think I have to convince our readers of the scientific value of natural history collections — see here and here for some examples — but they’re also, of course, incredibly important local institutions of public science. Natural history museums remain highly trusted by the public, even as other institutions have lost standing, and they can provide both “big-picture” overviews of the diversity of life and windows into ongoing research. Some, like the Field Museum in Chicago, include “fishbowl” laboratories where museum scientists work in public view, and many others have exhibits drawn from the current work of affiliated researchers. Most curate exhibits out of collections of specimens assembled for research purposes; the Beatty Biodiversity Museum at UBC, my current institutional affiliation, takes that idea to its limit with collections cabinets that double as display cases.
So mosey over to the campus museum after work today, or spend a weekend afternoon touring a city landmark. Leave your phone in your pocket. Except maybe if you want to take pictures.

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What's left of the black rhino's genetic diversity?

Posted on 22 Feb, 2017 by Patrícia Chrzanová Pečnerová

With the current poaching epidemic we might lose rhinos before we even have time to get to know them. Luckily, the day has come and thanks to Yoshan Moodley, Mike Bruford and their team we know have a pretty good idea about the genetic diversity of one rhino species, the black rhinoceros.
In ”the largest and most geographically representative sample of black rhinoceroses ever assembled” (as they boldly but appropriately state in the abstract) Moodley et al. compared 19th and 20th century museum specimens with modern samples from universities, zoos, private hunters, and faecal samples collected in the field. Their dataset stretched in time, between 1775 and 2008, as well as in space, covering 20 countries of the black rhino’s historical range. Just so that you know, now we are down to 5 countries.
Probably the most striking result of the study is the 69% loss of mitochondrial diversity, as only 20 out of 64 historical haplotypes were found in present populations.
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Posted in conservation, evolution, Paleogenomics, phylogeography, population genetics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Population genomics in the "melting pot"

Posted on 21 Feb, 2017 by Jeremy Yoder

(Flickr: Amanda)


North America is full of new arrivals. Europeans colonized the continent starting half a millennium ago, displaced and eradicated native populations, and brought enslaved workers from Africa with them — and further immigrants have followed ever since. This mass movement of people is a huge complication for studies of human population genetics, but it’s also an opportunity to study how that movement is reflected in the diversity of the people who now live in North America. One study of people in the Caribbean, for instance, found the effects of colonization and the slave trade, but also evidence of migration across the region that pre-dated both.
An important tool for studying the complex human history of North America is emerging from a consumer trend you’ve probably heard about on a couple thousand podcast sponsorship messages — personalized genetic analysis. Services like 23andMe and Ancestry.com offer genome-wide genotyping and comparison to geographically-specific samples to identify your ancestors’ origins, and both companies ask customers to volunteer their data for research. Data collected by 23andMe allowed comparison of genetic ancestry to racial and ethnic identity that reveals how slippery the relationship between race and biology really can be. Now, a study of AncestryDNA customers helps link the history of colonization and migration across North America to individual Americans’ family histories.
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Posted in genomics, pedigree | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Friday Action Item: Remind your Senators to vote against Scott Pruitt

Posted on 17 Feb, 2017 by Jeremy Yoder

“‘Teepee’ burner incinerates lumber mill’s waste, 05/1972.” — a photo taken by Boyd Norton as part of an early EPA project to document the country, before modern environmental regulations took effect, highlighted by the Discover EPA Twitter feed. (Flickr: US National Archives)


On Fridays while the current administration is in office we’re posting small, concrete things you can do to help make things better. Got a suggestion for an Action Item? E-mail us!
It’s been almost a full month since the inauguration (good heavens) and it’s hard to keep track of the scandals and outrages, more or less as expected. But if you’ve got it in you to make one call to Congress this week (and we hope you do), let us suggest you spend it on reinforcing the resistance to the nominee for head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Scott Pruitt has built a political career working against the very concept of evidence-based regulation — not just rules to reduce carbon emissions, but regulation of mercury and particulate pollution as well. The Senate is scheduled to vote on his confirmation today, even as Democrats have been requesting a delay while Pruitt’s office complies with a court order to release e-mails that could illuminate his ties to the fossil fuel industry, and EPA employees themselves are, extraordinarily, lobbying the Senate against a prospective boss who opposes the very mission of the agency.
So: Call your Senators. Tell them to vote against Pruitt.

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Music to an amniote's ears, an "accordion" model of genome size evolution

Posted on 10 Feb, 2017 by Kelle Freel

How did we get where we are? Genetically speaking, that is. A few posts ago, that whole genotype-phenotype question was discussed, how do genomes make plants and animals (and don’t forget the microbes!) look and act how they do. Another broader question linked to this topic involves trying to understand how genomes have evolved over time, clearly no small task.
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Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, evolution, genomics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Friday Action Item: Time for another round of Donors Choosing

Posted on 10 Feb, 2017 by Jeremy Yoder

(Flickr: Paul Gorbould)


On Fridays while the current administration is in office we’re posting small, concrete things you can do to help make things better. Got a suggestion for an Action Item? E-mail us!
This week the U.S. Senate approved Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, on a one-vote margin and over unprecedented opposition. DeVos is a billionaire heiress with no direct experience of public education, and was unable to answer basic questions about Federal education policy in her confirmation hearing, but she has spent millions lobbying for efforts to transfer public funding to for-profit charter schools and religious education.
So this seems like a good week to return to Donors Choose. The last time I proposed this as an Action Item, I pointed out that the U.S. K-12 education system has been horrifically unequal long before the arrival of Betsy DeVos, because most of our school funding comes from local property taxes. As Terry McGlynn noted this week on Twitter, it’s so routine for public school teachers to buy classroom supplies out of their own pocket that it’s a standard deduction item on income tax forms:


Donors Choose lets us help teachers save their none-too-generous paychecks by pitching in money for individual projects or classroom resources. You can easily search for biology-specific requests, or for schools in your own neighborhood, but here’s a few good options to get you started:

For bonus #resistance points, maybe add a memo to dedicate your donation to the new Secretary of Education.

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