Popular Science

It's amazing how context makes all the difference in appreciating and understanding science. I was trying to catch up on some journal reading yesterday, and in my quick scan of the table of contents of Science, I completely passed over an article entitled "Local Nanomechanical Motion of the Cell Wall of Saccharomyces cerevisiae". However, after hearing a piece on NPR later that day about how scientists at UCLA used a "diving board" to "listen" to yeast cells vibrating and "screaming" when they were exposed to alcohol, I had to go back and check out the Science article, an summary of which can be found at the NPR website. Finding a good analogy seems to be key in making science accessible and interesting to a mainstream audience.

CNN.com routinely does the same sort of popularization of recent scientific studies. Yesterday I read a fascinating article on Nature Science Update about a tribe in the Amazon whose language has no words for numbers beyond "one", "two", and "many". Tribe members were apparently unable to keep track of objects that were greater in number than three. The selfsame study showed up on the CNN website later that afternoon with the headline "Tribe has great excuse for poor math skills". Hey, if it gets people interested in science, I'm all for it.

At the same time, I have to admit that my other favorite CNN.com article of the day was "Bear guzzles 36 beers and passes out".