Pandemic shaming can backfire—here’s a better way

Enlarge (credit: Nopphon Pattanasri / EyeEm)

With the holiday season continuing and the spread of COVID-19 widely expected to worsen, many of us face the same gut-wrenching decision: to gather or not to gather? Do we take comfort in familiar rituals with family and friends—or should we limit celebrations to the relative isolation of our COVID-19 bubbles?

During a pandemic that has already claimed more than 1.4 million lives worldwide, the safest strategy, unquestionably, is to abstain from festivities with those outside of our immediate households. But not everyone values safety more than social connection—and public shaming and blanket demands for abstinence can backfire. How, then, can we balance our security and sanity, to ensure that we save as many lives as possible?

A concept developed by and for people who inject drugs can help.

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How electric lighting changed our sleep, and other stories in materials science

Enlarge / A housewife proudly presents her indispensable Pyrex kitchenware (1955). Ainissa Ramirez tells the story of its invention, and how it molded human behavior in turn, in her book, The Alchemy of Us. (credit: Chaloner Woods/Getty Images)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Kick off the new year with physicist and "science evangelist" Ainissa Ramirez as she tells engaging stories about materials science, the technologies it enables, and how those technologies impact human behavior in her book, The Alchemy of Us.

The American 19th century entrepreneur Thomas Edison is perhaps most famous for his development of the incandescent light bulb, but few people likely know that part of his inspiration came from an obscure fellow inventor in Connecticut named William Wallace. Edison visited Wallace's workshop on September 8, 1878, to check out the latter's prototype "arc light" system. Edison was impressed, but he thought he could improve on the system, which used a steam-powered dynamo to produce an incredibly bright light—much too bright for household use, more akin to outdoor floodlights. The result was the gentle glow of the incandescent bulb.

Other inventors had come up with versions of an incandescent lamp prior to Edison, but the Menlo Park wizard discovered an excellent incandescent material in carbonized bamboo that lasted for over 1000 hours, and also devised a fully integrated system of electric lighting to drive adoption of this new technology. Edison found a material he could shape to his needs. But electric lighting would in turn shape how people slept, as physicist and self-described "science evangelist" Ainissa Ramirez explains in her book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, released in April.

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When memes fail anatomy: The scale of a blue whale’s butthole

Enlarge / That stuff floating in the water is exactly what you think it is. (credit: Jeff Gritchen/Orange County Register)

When we saw the memes scoring the size of a blue whale’s anus second to some of the year’s most reviled politicians, our first thought was that it was deliciously funny. Naturally, our next thought was, “Is this true?” and “How big is a blue whale’s anus, anyway?"

The first obstacle getting an answer to these pressing questions was persuading scientists to answer interview requests. One admitted that at first, he assumed his colleagues were messing with him. Once convinced our request was not a joke, the situation improved only slightly.

“Most of the data that we have on large whale species comes from back in the day when we used to kill a lot of them,” says Dr. Mark Leslie, a visiting marine biology professor at Swarthmore College. And by “a lot” Leslie refers to a whaling industry that killed 2 million to 3 million blue whales, likely restructured marine ecosystems, and nearly drove them extinct. “And to be honest,” Leslie says, “there wasn't a whole lot of interest in an anuses.”

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Superhero showdown: Which comic book rumble was the real Battle of the Century?

Hmm, we're sensing a trend here... (credit: Kerry Callen)

Update, 1/1/21: It's New Year's Day, and Ars staff is still enjoying some necessary downtime to prepare for a new year (and a slew of CES emails, we're sure). While that happens, we're resurfacing some vintage Ars stories like this 2014 examination of a classic comic book claim, "The Battle of the Century." This piece was first published on December 10, 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

Here's one of those hidden-in-plain-sight industry secrets: headlines sell. Whether it's cover lines on your favorite magazine, the title of a new novel, or headlines on Ars and elsewhere, good display text should draw readers in and spell out what's coming.

When it comes to headlines and 20th century comic books, there's one phrase that keeps popping up. Several books—not, one, not two, not three—boldly claim the title of "The Battle of the Century" on their covers. But since that 100 years is now behind us, we can look back to decide which truly was the Battle of the Century (and possibly call everyone else a liar).

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How researchers are making do in the time of Covid

Enlarge (credit: Ted Horowitz | Getty Images)

One of the astonishing aspects of the human response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been how quickly scientists pivoted to studying every facet of the virus in order to mitigate the loss of life and plan for a return to normalcy. At the same time, a lot of non-coronavirus research ground to a near halt.

With research labs and offices shuttered for all but essential workers, many scientists were stuck at home, their fieldwork and meetings canceled and planned experiments kicked down the road as they struggled to figure out how to keep their research programs going. Many took the opportunity to catch up on writing grants and papers; some—in between caring for kids—came up with strategic workarounds to keep the scientific juices flowing.

To gauge how researchers in different fields are managing, Knowable Magazine spoke with an array of scientists and technical staff—among thema specialist keeping alive genetically important strains of fruit flies, the maintenance chief of an astronomical observatory working to keep telescopes safe and on standby during the lockdown, and a pediatrician struggling to manage clinical trials for a rare genetic disease. Here are a few slices of scientific life during the pandemic.

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30 years since the Human Genome Project began, what’s next?

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Getty Images)

In 1987, when researchers first used the word genomics to describe the newly developing discipline of mapping DNA, Eric Green had just finished medical school. A few years later, he found himself working on the front lines of the young field’s marquee moon shot: the Human Genome Project. To lead the nation’s participation in the global effort, Congress established the National Human Genomics Research Institute, or NHGRI, in 1989.

Sequencing the entire human genome began the following year, and it took 13 years to complete. Not long after, in 2009, Green took the helm of the research institute. By then, NHGRI’s mission had evolved to include expanding the field of genomics into medicine. That meant funding and coordinating projects aimed at pinpointing the mutations responsible for genetic disorders, then developing tests to diagnose them and therapies to treat them. And even more broadly, it meant generating evidence that DNA data could effectively improve outcomes, even for people who don’t suffer from rare diseases.

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How the humble slime mold helped physicists map the cosmic web

Enlarge / A reconstruction of the cosmic web— a vast network of filamentary structures of matter spanning the universe—modeled on the growth patterns of slime mold. (credit: Joseph N. Burchett et al./AJL)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: how physicists used the growth patterns of the humble slime mold to model the dark matter that makes up the filaments of the cosmic web.

The backbone of our cosmos is a vast network of interconnected giant filaments, with huge voids in between. Most of the material that makes up this "cosmic web" is dark matter, along with diffuse and distant gas. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), devised a unique approach to modeling this cosmic web, based on the growth patterns of slime mold, and found some striking similarities. They described their approach in a March paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"We don't think the universe was created by a giant slime mold," co-author Joseph Burchett told Ars, dashing our hopes of a novel new creation myth. "This really comes down to the similarities of the products of these two very disparate processes. At the end of the day, the similarities arise in the optimality of nature."

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