news from the publishing world

News this week is that Springer Nature is selling off both Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft - and to different buyers as well. Spektrum goes to GeraNova Bruckmann, a media holding that has magazines for pet owners among other things, so I'm not quite sure about this move. The most scientific magazine I can spot in their portfolio is the German edition of National Geographic.

I started translating for Spektrum in 1991 and writing my own articles soon after, but somehow petered out in the 2010s as I got more work from Current Biology and the Spektrum pieces tended to take too long to come out. It looks like my most recent item in Spektrum appeared in January 2020.

So a loss more at the nostalgia front and not a business problem, but still ...

Speaking of nostalgia, I still have all the print issues from the 1980s through to the 2020s (they stopped sending me complimentary copies a few years ago). These issues may soon become another relic of a bygone era.

Here's an astrobiology-themed cover from 2015:

And here's a photo of multiple issues of Spektrum prepared for this article about my writing career:

three horsemen of distrust

One of the many worrying developments of our time is the growing lack of trust in objective rationally testable (and falsifiable) facts of science. I am on the lookout for explanations what went wrong with our science-based civilisation and how we can fix it, so was happy to review

Gary Smitn
Distrust: big data. data torturing and the assault on science
OUP 2023

Smith is an economist and maybe a bit more interested in the idiocies of bitcoin than I am, but otherwise he is very convincing in his analysis of three leading horsemen of the distrust apocalypse, namely disinformation, data torturing, and data mining. Ironically, all three are riding on the advances of the technological revolution that were supposed to make us smarter. Read all about it in the October issue of C & I:

What went wrong?

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 10, October 2023, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

OUP

I have no idea what the cover image is showing, but I like it.

covid communications

Covid-19 challenges the whole world in multiple ways, but possibly the most important crunch points are at the science communication / policy interface, because this is where failures lead to bad decisions, and bad decisions cost lives. Many thousands of lives.

I'm trying not to be parochial, ie not to give the UK perspective undue preference when writing about global issues, but in this case the UK happened to be one of the most outstanding examples, namely on how not to do communications in a public health crisis. So I'm afraid there is quite a lot about the UK's bungled Covid-19 response and science/policy/communications muddle in my feature, but other countries are also mentioned sometimes. And positive examples of good communications also get a shoutout.

As all the content of Cell Press journals relating to Covid-19, this is appearing on open access, but I have also been sent a magic link. So if open access doesn't work for you or stops working within the first seven weeks, try that.


Communicating science in a crisis


Current Biology Volume 30, Issue 13, 06 July 2020, Pages R737-R739

Free access to full text and PDF download




When to wear face protection has been one of the many issues on which conflicting and changeable information has been given to the general public. (Photo: Engin_Akyurt/Pixabay.)

Erlebnis Wissenschaft

for more than a decade, from Was Biotronik alles kann (2002) to Invasion der Waschbären (2014), my books in German were published by Wiley-VCH, mostly in their general pop-science series Erlebnis Wissenschaft (not quite translatable, this suggests science is an exciting experience).

Since the publication of the raccoons’ book in 2014, I have had no luck with further proposals, and have been given to understand that the sales of the series weren’t as good as the publisher hoped. Checking up the programme this summer, I realised that the last new title was published in 2016. One that is listed in 2018 is in fact the paperback version of a book previously published in hardback. Coming from the main website, the list doesn’t even have a link, so I had to use search engines to find it here. So, reluctantly, I am having to switch back to hustle mode and try to find a new publisher.

I can accept that on a purely balance-based reckoning, the books may not have been very profitable, but then again, Wiley-VCH is a huge publisher with successful academic titles (the white and blue design inherited from the original Verlag Chemie) as well as the licence for the German version of the hugely successful “For Dummies” series, not to mention a vast array of academic journals. All of which surely could help to fund a bit of an effort to help the public understanding of science with a series of intermediate level popular science books.

Oh well. I may have written critical reviews of one or two of the titles shown below, but I surely will miss the series.




For this photo I rounded up my own titles in the series and a few from other authors. Since taking the photo I keep discovering others that I forgot (eg the biographies of Haber and Lynen and the memoir of Schatz – for the biographies alone it would be worthwhile keeping the series alive).

fun with science

Current Biology starts its 25th year today and, in celebration, issue 1 of vol 25 is dedicated to the biology of fun and all things fun in biology (there's also a press release for this).

My contribution to this has been a look back at my own work in science communication (not quite 25 yet but soon) and to reflect on how having fun with and occasionally even making fun of science can help the worthy cause of disseminating the insights of science to a wider public.

The joy of science communication

Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 1, pR27–R30, 5 January 2015

Free access to full text and PDF download.

Own photo of young people having fun with science at the Oxford Museum of Natural History.

the male-only prize for science books

The shortlisted titles for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books this year are:

Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead
The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll
Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change That Shape Life by Enrico Coen
Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory by Charles Fernyhough
The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson
Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts

Notice anything strange? Hint: look at the first names of the authors. All six of them are men. Surely some coincidence? Well, I went through the list of winners for the last 26 years and the shortlists for the last 14 years. The prize – with its many renamings and reincarnations – has never been won by a woman, which becomes less surprising when you consider that out of the last 14 shortlists, only 5 contained a woman (and none had more than one). That’s 5 / 84 or 6%. (Funnily enough, I seem to remember the fellows of the Royal Society have about the same gender ratio?) In other words: since the year 2000, nine years have produced all-male shortlists.

Taking a quick look at my popular science shelves, I acknowledge that the majority of authors are male, but not an embarrassingly large majority. Some of my all-time favourite popular science books are written by women, including Woman, by Natalie Angier, and Deadly companions, by Dorothy Crawford. The latter title was published in 2007, so could have been shortlisted for 2008. As it happens, 2008 was one of the years without a woman on the shortlist. Plastic Fantastic, a very important book about how science is done these days (using a famous recent case of misconduct), by Eugenie Samuel Reich was published in 2009 – again there was no woman on the 2010 shortlist.

I suppose this is due to an accumulation of bias over the many selective steps involved, from an author drumming up the confidence to make a book proposal, via a publisher accepting the proposal, a publisher suggesting the book to be considered for a prize, through to the longlisting, shortlisting, and prize-giving process.

In any case, it’s clear to me that the prize has consistently failed to reflect the contribution that women make to writing about science, so it should either be scrapped or fixed. Fixing would require positive discrimination – from my experience with “zipper” style gender alternation rules in Germany’s Green Party in the 1980s and 90s I can confirm that very simple measures can work miracles not just for the representation but also for the way things are done – if every committee has at least 50% female participation, the management style is improved dramatically.

Similarly, positive discrimination at the top of the science book prize, making sure that women are visible in the shortlist (e.g. by widening the shortlist), could feed back to the previous selection levels, such that more women are inspired to write about science, more publishers commission them, and more publishers put them forwards for prizes. It shouldn’t be difficult.

The winner of this year's prize will be announced on Monday 25th. We already know the winning author will be a man. Maybe they should rename it the male-only prize for science books.

wrong gender?

the curse of the inverted helix

I've now figured out what to do with DNA double helices of the wrong chirality, which I frequently see in print and online. Earlier I started compiling a hall of shame, but that might reinforce the wrong image (eg by adding to the already considerable proportion of wrong helices that show up in google searches for double helix).

Instead, I'm now going to flip the images that also contain text, such that the DNA will be the right way round and the text will be mirrored. This way, I can signal-boost the correct structure while also exposing the error.

So, for example, a poster I received yesterday now looks like this:

much better, huh?

The same treatment for the historic blunders of Nature and Science yields:

gecko alert

I have recently submitted both the book manuscripts that have kept me very busy since September, so I can now begin to reveal what they are about. The first one is a collection of nanoworld-related pieces from the last six years or so, written in German. It is organised similarly to my very first book, Expeditionen in den Nanokosmos(1995), which later appeared in English as Travels to the Nanoworld, although the field has grown and changed a lot since then.

Back in 1995, travels to the world of the invisibly small were the reserve of a very small number of well-equipped and adventurous pioneers. Now there are “nano” labelled institutes and companies everywhere, there are nanosized structures in every computer you can buy in the shops, and there are nanoparticles in most sun lotions.

The field has become so huge that I wouldn’t be able to give a representative account of it. Thus, the idea this time was to present my compilation of nano articles as a collection of “postcards from the nanoworld” without claiming much logic or completeness. These glimpses at the vastness of the small world would be flanked by an introduction and an outlook chapter as they were in my very first book.

This concept worked out very well for the content of the book, but didn’t quite make it onto the cover. The publishers preferred to pick specific ideas from the collection, so we’ve ended up with a gecko-themed book called "Von Geckos, Garn und Goldwasser: Die Nanoweltwelt lässt grüßen" which in a way fits in nicely with my previous platypus collection .

The book is due to come out in September this year and will look like this:



It is already listed at amazon.de. Further details and a dedicated gecko-website to follow soon.

the right diet for me

review of:

The wine diet
Roger Corder
Sphere, 2007

I may be a bit biased, as I am very partial for a glass of Côtes du Rhone and a bit of dark (>70%) chocolate, so any book that tells me these two are good for me already has one bonus point. On the other hand, I’m not much of a foodie and wouldn’t normally dream of buying a book that has “diet” in the title, so I guess that cancels out.

My lifestyle choices and agreement with the author’s opinion apart, this is an interesting blend of popular science writing and nutrition advice including recipes, all informed by the author’s own research into the effects that one group of chemicals found in red wine and fruit has on the lining of our blood vessels and hence on the health of our heart and circulation.

The short message is that oligomeric procyanidins (and not the more widely known resveratrol) are the likely cause of the “French” paradox, namely the unusually long life expectancy of people in Southern France and other places where a Mediterranean lifestyle is cultivated (Sardinia is the place to be, apparently, if you want to live to 100!). These polyphenols are present in certain red wines (especially in those produced following more traditional procedures), as well as in fruit and berries including cranberries, pomegranate, and raspberries. As these molecules have an adstringent effect as well, modern food processing methods tend to do what they can to remove or destroy them.

The author is very eloquent at explaining what - according to recent research from his lab and others - is good for us, and manages to debunk some “voodoo science” along the way, including the excessive cult of antioxidants. Very interesting read – obviously even more satisfactory if you happen to like the kind of food he recommends.

inverted moons

Love the story about the inverted moons on christmas cards: Your moons are rubbish, astronomer tells Christmas card artists

I should just add that one doesn't need to know about waning moons and what time they rise - it is completely sufficient to know that both Sun and Moon move from left to right in the sky (seen from the Northern hemisphere outside the tropics) and that the bright side of the moon points towards where the Sun is. So in the wrong xmas card, the bright side points to the left, so the Sun is trailing the Moon and will rise in a couple of hours, so it must be early morning. For an evening scene, you want a Sun that has recently set, so bright side of the Moon must point to the right. Simples.

Are these artists the same people who insist on putting inverted helices on the covers of books and magazines, I wonder ...

chemistry all around the world

The round-up of German pieces published this month includes a clever application of llama antibodies, celebrations of the International Year of Chemistry circling the globe, and debates over the circling of the square story from last autumn.


Streit um die Quadratur des Kohlenstoffs
Chemie in unserer Zeit 45, 82

In 80 Feiern um die Welt
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 59, 403

Mini-Antikörper für Maxi-Effekt
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 59, 435-6

Genghis Khan's winning ways

I’m so excited – just found out I’m in the shortlist for a literary prize. Well, errr, a book title that I suggested for the Diagram Prize (oddest book title of the year) is on the shortlist: Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way. And last time I checked the online votes, it was leading by a large margin. [Update 28.3.: turns out Genghis Khan and I actually won the award! Woo hooooo!]

Still haven’t checked with my dentist whether she’s following this approach. We should be told.

The six titles on the shortlist are:

8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings
Various authors (TWI)
The Generosity of the Dead
Graciela Nowenstein (Ashgate)
The Italian's One-night Love Child
Cathy Williams (Mills & Boon)
Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way
Michael R Young (Radcliffe)
Myth of the Social Volcano
Martin King Whyte (Stanford University Press)
What Color Is Your Dog?
Joel Silverman (Kennel Club)

I love the last one, actually, as it shows how you can achieve absurdity with very simple means, without using a single unusual word.

A collection of 50 book covers from the shortlists of the first 30 years of the prize was published in 2008: How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books. Sadly my personal favourite "Procrastination and task avoidance, a practical guide" (shortlisted some time in the late 90s) isn't included.

Recently, oddity lovers in Germany have also set up a prize: Kuriosester Buchtitel. With my most recent title “9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums,” I might be at risk of getting nominated. Which would be ironic and nicely circular, as the original Diagram Prize is covered in one of the chapters, greek rural postmen and all.


PS I don't think I own a single book from the Diagram shortlists. Maybe I should get this one, it got glowing reviews at amazon:




amazon.co.uk

Two cultures and counting

Review of
The Honest Look by Jennifer L. Rohn
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2010
(out on November 30th)



The cultural divide between the worlds of science and arts has stirred much debate since CP Snow diagnosed it in the 1950s. How much specialisation is good for society, and how much general knowledge from the sciences should extend to the other side of the divide? The idea has inspired several generations of science popularisers, but we rarely read about its effect on people who straddle both sides or are unsure which side they should be on.

The protagonist of “The Honest Look”, Claire Cyrus (no relation of Miley I hope), is one of the straddlers. She has just completed a PhD in biology, but is more passionate about writing and reading poetry than about her science, which involves a monstrous proteomic analysis instrument, a machine with the size, complexity, and neediness of the Beckman model E ultracentrifuge from the 1960s (no, I’m not that old, but my PhD supervisor still used two of these in the 90s).

Adding to the culture shock is the fact that her first post-doctoral appointment, taking care of the first commercial specimen of that machine, is in a biotech start-up, where we have the corporate culture conflicting with her hitherto purely academic upbringing. A third cultural divide opens up as the company in question is based in the Netherlands, but most of the scientific staff members are Brits who migrated there with the scientific founders. Oh, and our heroine is bilingual, the child of a Spanish mother and British father.

Unlike Rohn’s first lablit novel, Experimental Heart, which had a thriller plot, this one is essentially a romance, so as a fifth binary we have two contrasting male specimens competing for the attention of our heroine, and naturally each has different views on the cultural conflicts listed above, so love also pulls her in different directions on these other issues of cultural identity.

With all those conflicting forces tearing her apart and cultural canyons to fall into, not to mention a serious moral dilemma arising from an unexpected scientific result, one does worry about Dr Cyrus a lot, which keeps the pages turning just as fast as a thriller plot. Rohn pulls out all the writerly stops to make the poetic sensibility of her heroine believable, and succeeds as far as I can discern from my vantage point between cultures (English poetry buffs may have their own opinions).

She is also very good at bringing the expat perspective on Amsterdam (where she lived herself for several years) and the surrounding lowlands to life. With my rather vague and informal knowledge of Dutch I loved the paragraph where one of the characters translates mundane everyday Dutch into Shakespearean English to illustrate the similarities. (I might have used this as a running gag, actually, for comic relief when the story gets tense.)

What I found less convincing was everything involving the use of Spanish – firstly, I don’t understand why Claire, with Spanish and English and a love of words, doesn’t really extend her love to Spanish, which in my ears is the more interesting and poetic language of the two. Then, the character called “Ramon” (rather than Ramón) lost his accent in more than one way – the dialogues reported to have been held in Spanish don’t sound like something translated from Spanish to me. Even some of the Spanish interjections (querida, Dios mío, por favor,) sound as though they had been translated from English, not glimpsed from a Spanish dialogue. I think with a language used so widely in popular culture (CSI Miami through to latin pop music) one can actually get away with longer snippets giving a more authentic impression.

Having said that, it’s still a wonderful novel, and it addresses cultural conflicts that are very important to me and should be to a wider readership as well. So I hope it does find readers on all sides of these cultural divides, and thereby helps to bridge the gap between Snow’s Two Cultures (and a few more).

Tweet

I can see your heartbeat

I love the way the heartbeat is visualised in this new video by Enrique Iglesias ft. Nicole Scherzinger:



Ok, I'll admit that I love everything else about this video as well, but the heartbeat thing is a good excuse to file it under "public understanding of science" and embed it here. Enjoy!

not all chemicals are bad

... it must be true, as I read it on a sign outside a pub:



I spotted this important contribution to public enlightenment today in St. Clements, Oxford. Also uploaded six other Oxford pix to my flickr photostream.

science drives the plot

review of:

Experimental heart
By Jennifer L. Rohn
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2009

Jennifer Rohn is famous for promoting the idea that we need more fiction with realistic scientists in leading roles, via her website lablit.com, and other outlets including Nature. In an effort to practice what she preaches, she has written a couple of “lablit” novels herself, of which Experimental heart is the debut effort.

As the “lablit” label suggests, the lab, located in an academic research centre in London, and the science conducted there (and in a small biotech company next door) play very important parts in the novel. It’s not just that the ambitions of a slightly mad scientist drive the plot, the scientific agenda also shapes the encounters of the characters, and science metaphors colour their speech and indeed the voice of the narrator.

I was wondering in the beginning why the author has chosen to slip into the skin of a male narrator, post-doc Andy O’Hara, but it soon becomes clear that he is the central atom entirely surrounded by a coordination sphere of intriguing females, including five scientists and his mother. I’m beginning to suspect that the name of the local pub where some of the events unfold, King Henry VIII., may have something to do with this bouquet of six women.

Not surprisingly, hard-working Andy is quite confused by the various attractive forces acting in this coordination sphere and it takes him 360 pages to figure it out and get all the bond lengths and angles right. In comparison, the thriller sub-plot with the mad scientist comes relatively easy to him, as he can use scientific methods and straightforward experiments to work out what is going on there.

To me, as someone who has grown up, lived, and worked in the science culture that this story is set in, the whole thing feels completely like home – sometimes even too close for comfort. The lab part aside, the lit part is also very nicely done, written fluently and convincingly, though not letting the style get in the way of the science.

Whether it works equally well for people who have never heard of Taq polymerase or transcription factors is another matter, and I wouldn’t be able to tell. I would imagine that avid readers of crime novels, who like to exercise their grey matter while reading, may be up to the task of following the science plot, while others may find it too much work. My guess would be that most of the readers who enjoy and finish the novel will be scientists (which is also the case for my books, so no criticism), but hey, if it gives us the feeling that we could be the heroes of fictional (but realistic) adventures, that’s a good thing, too.

I am certainly looking forward to the second novel, due out this autumn.



PS,the single lit window, as shown on the cover, is a recurring motif ...

lablit up and coming?

Jennifer Rohn writes in the current issue of Nature that lablit (i.e. realistic novels with scientists as central characters shown to engage in scientific research) appears to experience a boom, with an increasing number of lablit novels being published every year since around 1990.

Come to think of it, I haven't read all that many books that fit her definition. Off the cuff, I can remember:

Carl Djerassi: Cantor's Dilemma (which also got Rohn interested in this)
Carl Sagan: Contact
Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the world


Missing from the LabLit list is German author Karl Aloys Schenzinger who is a pioneer of the genre:

Anilin. Roman eines Farbstoffes (1936)
Metall (1939)
Atom (1950)
Schnelldampfer (1951)
Bei I.G. Farben (1951)

but who is somewhat discredited by being also the author of Hitlerjunge Quex (1932), a novel glorifying the Nazi youth organisation.


An Austrian refugee working in Canada, Charles Wassermann (1924-78) novelised the discovery of insulin in the book:

Insulin (1966)

Also missing is Jules Verne. Looking up by topics, one can find loads of novels about scientists, eg about Kepler the German wikipedia entry lists:

Rosemarie Schuder: Der Sohn der Hexe – In der Mühle des Teufels. Berlin: Rütten & Loening 1968
Wilhelm und Helga Strube: Kepler und der General. Berlin: Neues Leben 1985
Johannes Tralow: Kepler und der Kaiser. Berlin: Verlag der Nation 1961

As for the reasons for the increase over the last 20 years, I reckon that Djerassi's success with Cantor's dilemma may have triggered something like a chain reaction.

On second thoughts, the graph shown in Nature would also be compatible with the interpretation that lablit novels decay with a half life of 10 years.

PS Many years ago I read a book that comprehensively analyses the image of scientists in literature - I vaguely remember I found it quite inspiring at the time (need to read it again at some point). That's "From Faust to Strangelove" by Roslynn Haynes, Johns Hopkins University Press 1994 (Paperback 1995)

you've been pottered

I guess it wasn't surprising but I still get slightly depressed looking at Germany's top 20 bestsellers of the decade, published in the current issue of Der Spiegel.

In the fiction list we have Harry Potter in positions 1, 2, 3, 14, 16, and 18. Dan Brown in 5 and 15, Stephenie Meyer in 8, 9, and 20, and Germany's very own fantasy kidult fiction writer Cornelia Funke (Inkheart, etc.) in places 6, 11, 19 (which already counts as good news, I guess). Two German originals which I found mildly interesting (Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the world and Charlotte Roche's Wetlands) made 7 and 4, respectively.

There is the school of thinking that says that many of those millions reading Harry Potter wouldn't have read any book otherwise. But I tend to think if they only read fantasy and nothing else, they might as well read nothing, it wouldn't make much difference. What I am worried about is the other side of the spectrum. A phenomenon like the noughties fantasy tsunami pulls along people from all sides, including those who might otherwise have spent their time reading more intelligent books. So if people come along and say Rowling did great work for public literacy, I have to object and point out that pottermania may also have stopped people from reading more intelligent books and dealing with the real world.

The non-fiction side of the list (another 20 titles including one by the pope) is less easy to categorise but just as depressing. Suffice it to say that a "medicine for kids" title is the only thing that is coming anywhere near science.

what DID the researchers find ?

In last Thursday's Guardian there is a full page in the main section on new research on the epigenome (i.e. the way the information in the genome is regulated). I read the whole page twice and still didn't know anything about what the new research was and what its results were.

The only useful information was that researchers at the Salk institute in California published something in Nature (even that was half wrong, it wasn't in the current issue of Nature, but only online in Nature's advanced online publications).

When the Guardian stopped publishing a weekly science supplement (to which I occasionally contributed), we were promised regular science coverage in the main pages instead. However, what is the use of this coverage if all meaningful content is removed from it? I mean, what is the point of spending a whole page on explaining what the epigenome is and that it may help to cure cancer and schizophrenia (which, by the way, I consider to be just hype, it may or may not do that, just as any fundamental research in the life sciences may help to find a cure for cancer), if we aren't actually told what the researchers did and what they found out?

This amounts to treating the readers as complete idiots, it's like telling them that storks deliver babies. I'll now open a new category in this blog, called storks+babies, dedicated to science reporting that has been simplified to death.

In a hurry, I only found one report that is more informative (even though it's shorter) here.

save the nanokosmos

PS -- panic over, an administrator has now removed the deletion notice ! --

I've posted a new entry for "Nanokosmos" on the German edition of Wikipedia, and it took all of 3 minutes until somebody kindly suggested it for deletion. Now it's on death row for 7 days, and then an administrator will decide whether to delete it or whether to remove the deletion notice.

German speaking readers can help to save the nanokosmos by contributing to the discussion or, indeed, by improving the article and making it less deletion-worthy.

I note that the english equivalent, nanoworld, although now widely used, is also lacking a wikipedia entry.