Random science
Feb. 10th, 2009 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigerfortThe BBC has some fantastic footage of Narwhals travelling through cracks in Arctic sea-ice, while one of their reporters has blogged about the government's scientific drugs advisor's frustration with the way figures are taken out of context - both by the government and by the press.
In other news, current extinction risk models may be excessively cautious in their assumptions - the actual risks may be a hundred times greater, or even higher. The periodic reports that the Earth's magnetic field is just about to flip poles would seem to be rather overstating the risk of it happening soon, otoh. (nb: to a geologist, 'soon' means 'in the next four thousand years' :) Meanwhile, Ed Yong has posted summaries of a whole range of stuff, including rapid speciation in insects and their parasites, butterflies evolving resistance to bacteria that killed only the males, and the (unsurprising[1]) research suggesting that if people learn to distinguish better between members of another cultural group, their implicit bias against that group diminishes. Of course, if they're consciously bigoted, there's not much you can do for them.
[1] to me, at least. Pigeonholing people leads to stereotypes and bias; recognising that members of $GROUP all look different will make it harder to assume they're all the same inside (even for a determined bigot, I suspect, but certainly for anyone who wants to think of people as individuals rather than as $PROPERTY-people).
In other news, current extinction risk models may be excessively cautious in their assumptions - the actual risks may be a hundred times greater, or even higher. The periodic reports that the Earth's magnetic field is just about to flip poles would seem to be rather overstating the risk of it happening soon, otoh. (nb: to a geologist, 'soon' means 'in the next four thousand years' :) Meanwhile, Ed Yong has posted summaries of a whole range of stuff, including rapid speciation in insects and their parasites, butterflies evolving resistance to bacteria that killed only the males, and the (unsurprising[1]) research suggesting that if people learn to distinguish better between members of another cultural group, their implicit bias against that group diminishes. Of course, if they're consciously bigoted, there's not much you can do for them.
[1] to me, at least. Pigeonholing people leads to stereotypes and bias; recognising that members of $GROUP all look different will make it harder to assume they're all the same inside (even for a determined bigot, I suspect, but certainly for anyone who wants to think of people as individuals rather than as $PROPERTY-people).