NYTimes Science times: Public gets a peek at Bronze Age Europe; one take on the email climate hack ; beetle glue ; more…
Oh boy, time for a break from climate wars, mutating contagions, overpopulated everybody, vanishing species, and polluted air. John Noble Wilford gets the big piece in the week’s sci. section. He delivers to his readers a bronze age culture, or set of cultures, of which few people outside the academy ever heard before. They lived in a big green world full of wildness, built large towns, smelted copper, did fine pottery, carved little venus figurines that look demure and pretty rather than grotesquely dumpy like some of those found with earlier, neolithic groups, seemed to have been good with spirals and, best of all, wore gold ornaments. This is completely non-neurosis-inspiring and edifying news. It won’t win any awards, as it is inspired by a show at an NYU museum (which must be stunned by the publicity), but is satisfyingly solid and safely long-ago. It even has reference to the discounted but appealing notions of a goddess-worshiping, fairly peaceful, and female-dominated culture in Europe that the late anthropologist Marija Gimbutas said only expired after warlike brutes rode in on horseback.
Other, perhaps less diverting but notable headlines:
- John Tierney: E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science ; Tierney, as expected of the section’s primary contrarion, appears to be not fully on board with climate change as simultaneously real, serious, getting worse, our fault, and treatable if we act firmly. But he’s not closed to the possibility of all that, one infers. So his summary of the nefariously hacked climate e-mails at the U. of East Anglia is well worth reading. However, why does he find it notable that some of the scientists in such a sharp-elbowed business can be churlish about competitors in private? One wonders, too, what we’d see if such skeptics as Pat Michaels, Lord Monckton, or the bunch at the Heartland Institute who organize its climate science meetings were to let the world read all their private communications? Wonder how noble those conversations have been, I do.
- Nicholas Wade: We May Be Born With an Urge to Help: A German psychologist who appears every once in a while in the news, Michael Tomasello, has a new book out on human cooperation with lots of data on how innately cooperative (far more than chimps) little children are. It’s interesting, not surprising, and we learn that war is just a very destructive variant on cooperation. For another perhaps more satisfying story stemming in small part from the man’s work, try LiveScience‘s Clara Moskowitz‘s recent Wolves beat dogs when it comes to logic. (Yes, off topic, but just saw it and have to share).
- Henry Fountain: A Beetle, Its Eggs and the Secrets of a Glue ; Another sampling, from the Observatory news roundup, of the power of writing short. This thing gives one about as much as one might actually remember a week later from a long feature – but fast. Drama, discovery, surprise, payoff. Even a touch of conflict, resolution, and vindication. All in four grafs.
As usual, lots more. Whole Section;
- Charlie Petit
