The Abstract Blog

Most New Yorkers think of medians – islands in the middle of busy streets – as not much more than temporary respites from taxi- or bus-induced death. (I’m speaking from experience – I crossed Park Avenue at least twice every school day while attending high school.)

So it stands to reason that as they move (usually quickly) from street corner-to-median-to street corner, most New York pedestrians aren’t thinking much about the grassy patches or flower plantings in and around the medians. And they’re really not thinking about some of the other denizens of medians – the ants.

Biologists like NC State’s Rob Dunn, a native Michigander, are interested in the effects of urban life on smaller creatures, and vice versa. He and colleagues from Columbia University examined ant life in a number of Manhattan medians, including some on major thoroughfares like Broadway and Park Avenue, and found it to be – like New York itself – a melting pot.

Researchers studied ant life in New York City medians, like the one at left.

The researchers found more than 6,500 ants from 13 different ant species, including three “foreign” ant species. They ranged from forest-dwelling, seed-dispersing ants to polygamous ants. There were also stinging ants native to Japan that were previously thought to have only invaded the Southeastern United States. As Dunn notes, these stinging ants – Asian needle ants, which are sometimes mistaken for fire ants – may be Southerners but they’re not very well-mannered. They can cause severe allergic reactions and are considered a threat to public health.

Three species dominated the scene, though: pavement ants that have taken up in Manhattan’s sidewalk cracks; cornfield ants that feed on the nectar secreted by certain aphids; and, perhaps unsurprising for New York, so-called thief ants that enjoy raiding the spoils of other ant colonies. Many of the ants found are poorly understood, even by ant experts.

Most surprising, perhaps, was the finding that “generalist” ants who enjoy living in the wake of human disturbances were outnumbered by ants with unique traits that use these traits to survive and thrive in the big city.

The study of Broadway’s biodiversity appears in the journal PLoS One and can be viewed here.

Are we inadvertently muddling the public's understanding of research?

Research is an incremental process, and there are precious few “Eureka!” moments when an idea springs forth fully formed, unfettered by qualifiers and questions that muddy the waters. As a result, those of us who write about science and medicine often take pains to ensure that we do not overstate research results. We use our own qualifiers when describing new findings, and try to educate our readers without overhyping the most recent study. But a new study finds that research-oriented news stories – particularly articles about cancer – are actually contributing to public uncertainty about the state of the science.

People with questions about cancer (often cancer patients and their families) seek information online – that’s certainly understandable. But researchers from NC State and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that most of the news articles online incorporate “uncertain terms” that can leave people even more confused about such critical issues as prevention, detection, treatment and mortality.

This study raises a significant question for science writers, myself included. If our goal is to inform and educate our readers, the last thing we want to do is add to their confusion about scientific and medical issues. So, what can we do to present new research findings – including their limitations – without increasing public uncertainty? (And yes, I know that there are instances where the questions posed by new discoveries are more interesting than the discoveries themselves.)

I don’t have any answers, but look forward to hearing from you.

Note: Here’s a great piece by Steve Silberman on the importance, and joy, of writing about science.

Another reasonable discussion about the risks and benefits of emerging science and technology.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote to John Adams that, “Truth between candid minds can never do harm.” But times have changed, and new research shows that discussion of the risks and benefits associated with emerging science and technology actually hurts efforts to build consensus on those issues.

A paper published this month by Risk Analysis finds that people’s opinions on sci/tech issues become even further entrenched after discussion. The result? No matter what side of an issue I started out on, I’m always right and you’re always wrong. (So that’s why the Flat Earth Society still exists!)

This means that people who are concerned about the risks associated with an emerging science or technology become more convinced of those risks as a result of talking about it. At the same time, those who are drawn to the potential benefits of new sci/tech perceive the benefits as being greater the more they talk about it.

This highlights the difficulties facing policy leaders as they try to engage the public on high-profile sci/tech issues, ranging from climate change to stem cell research. “Government agencies view research on these issues as vital and necessary for the country’s future, but building public consensus for that research is becoming increasingly difficult,” says NC State University’s Andrew Binder, lead author of the paper.

The paper doesn’t really provide answers, but it does help us better understand the problem – and can hopefully inform the way that policymakers and researchers engage the public when it comes to science and technology.

With luck, some day members of the general public may even be willing to change their minds based on evidence.

Do these simulated DNA strands seem about the right length to you?

This is not a purely abstract question (pun intended). Complementary strands of DNA are drawn to one another like magnets and iron filings – a trait that has created the emerging field of DNA self-assembly. But research, and industrial application, in this area has been hampered by a lack of reliability in how the DNA behaves. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it doesn’t. But scientists have now made a breakthrough that should help resolve that problem, and move the entire field forward.

DNA self-assembly is based on the idea that you can coat two different materials with complementary DNA, and that those two materials will come together when the DNA strands are drawn to each other. But the length of those DNA strands is important. If they’re too long, they’ll get tangled up with each other before they can find their “mate.” If they’re too short, they fold over onto themselves.

New research from NC State and the University of Melbourne shows that DNA strands should be longer than 10 bases, and shorter than 30 bases, to promote optimal self-assembly (remember, DNA is made up of base pairs). The researchers reached their conclusions using computer simulations to assess the behavior of DNA strands. The paper is published in Langmuir.

Dr. Daniel Ksepka talks about finding fossilized feathers from a 36 million-year-old species of penguin that lived near the Equator during the Eocene period.