Episode 1 of Grand Unified Weekly has landed at SlateV like a Megatherium brought down by a pack of Smilodons, and the world can never be the same again.
In this episode: Obama’s got a plan — for SCIENCE; the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came true, at least for a mouse; and headline-grabbing science papers are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most likely to be wrong.
Awesome theme song Comrade Elvis courtesy Hilotrons and Kelp Records, awesome co-host Christie Nicholson courtesy Scientific American
0101 - Obama - crypto-Republican on Science?
Germans have already decided that he’s the black JFK, but before you try taking that to the bank (check out the recession-busting price for blackjfk.com on ebay), consider this: is it possible Barack H. Obama, whose science-focused mutual admiration society includes 76 nobel laureates, is in fact the mixed-race Dwight D. Eisenhower?
As Nicholas Thompson put it in the Washington Monthly,
Republican Abraham Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. William McKinley, a president much admired by Karl Rove, won two presidential victories over the creationist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and supported the creation of the Bureau of Standards, forerunner of today’s National Institutes of Science and Technology. Perhaps the most pro-science president of the last century was Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former West Point mathematics and engineering student, and later president of Columbia University.
More:
- The official Obama / Biden plan for science, and a handy summary of same.
- The immediate action on stem cell research and climate change Obama plans to take as soon as he arrives in office.
- Those parody Obama posters featured in this episode.
- The ’scientists rocking out’ t-shirt design featured in this episode.
- Download your very own Obama for President of Space desktop background, or scrutinize his policy on space.
0102 - Eternal Sunshine of the Lab Mouse Mind
It’s hard to say which is more implausible — that it would be possible to selectively erase memories, or that Mark Ruffalo would in any universe be some kind of neuroscientist.
Turns out it’s the latter, at least in mice who have been genetically engineered to make way more a-CaMKII (’alpha cam kinase two’) than a normal mouse. Give the mouse a drug that suppresses the engineered copy of the gene that produces a-CaMKII, and they’re normal. Withdraw it while the mouse is recalling a memory of being shocked in a particular place in a test chamber, and voila, that memory, and apparently only that memory, is erased — even a month after the original memory is formed.
- New Scientist rounds up other research on selective memory erasure.
- It’s the Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog!
- If you can bear to skip the press release, or you don’t have a subscription to Neuron, the ‘postgraduate’ who blogs at Neurophilosophy coughed up an astonishingly detailed account of the experimental design required to prove that the memory erasure was, in fact, selective.
0103 - MSM: Mainstream Science Media
One of the authors of this paper, John P. A. Ioannidis, is apparently kind of a genius, if his ability to stir up spirited, statistics-minded discussion among his peers is any measure. (He’s best best known for the aptly-titled paper Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.) Never one to shy away from a fight, his latest paper tackles those headline-grabbing findings that, it turns out, are even more likely to be false than their less interesting brethren. Should we be surprised?
Related:
- Poison lunch boxes: how the Bush administration put industry ahead of protecting children from lead, and what the Obama administration is doing fix it
- Episode 3 - Plantnimal Discovered, NASA = The Office?, Why Being Awake Is Bad for You
- Episode 2 - Supercomputer Smackdown, Viral Videos, Robot-Driving Fruit Flies
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Just stumbled upon your video (while reading a Slate.com article) -
great stuff, really enjoyed it. I especially liked the way it was put
together - very novel.
I’ll be watching, and like Greg, evangelizing.
Keep it up.
Danny
As for high-flying science being more likely to be wrong, that is the nature of the game. Interesting=novel=paradigm challenging/defining, so yeah more likely to be wrong.
Of course most scientists live in fear of something they publish being proved wrong, that’s why we love those controls! But at the same time almost 95% of every thought any scientist has is generally wrong (that’s why we don’t just publish our thoughts and why those guys who “know the answer is right” and think they don’t have to do the experiments are always burned in effigy when found out). It is a weird dynamic: I know 95% of my hypothesis are WRONG, so sometimes it is hard to convince myself when I am right.
Catherine, I think your comment is more insightful than even you realize. I’ve read at least one analysis that reported that if you assume that out of 100 hypotheses, 80 are false and 20 are true, and you then evaluate them all with an ultimate p value better than 0.05, even if you did the science perfectly every time, you’d wrongly declare a hypothesis to be true about 25% of the time!
Also, unfortunately, you’re wrong about one thing - scientists do “just publish their ideas.” Haven’t you seen the Journal of Medical Hypotheses?