Science Authors From The United States

"This is considered the fundamental principle underlying modern genetic research: once evolution comes upon a genetic mechanism that works, it reuses it again and again. Those genes that regulate the development and the existence of any single living organism will likely be used in some similar fashion in all of them. “When reduced to essentials,” as the cancer researcher J. Michael Bishop suggested in his 1989 Nobel prize lecture, “the fruit fly and Homo sapiens are not very different.”"

"There is no such ambiguity, however, on the subject of carbohydrates. The most dramatic alterations in human diets in the past two million years, unequivocally, are (1) the transition from carbohydrate-poor to carbohydrate-rich diets that came with the invention of agriculture—the addition of grains and easily digestible starches to the diets of hunter-gatherers; (2) the increasing refinement of those carbohydrates over the past few hundred years; and (3) the dramatic increases in fructose consumption that came as the per-capita consumption of sugars—sucrose and now high-fructose corn syrup—increased from less than ten or twenty pounds a year in the mid-eighteenth century to the nearly 150 pounds it is today. Why would a dietary that excludes these foods specifically be expected to do anything other than return us to “biological normality”?"

"It’s not so much that fat fills us up as that carbohydrates prevent satiety, and so we remain hungry."

"Diet Revolution may have been, as its publisher claimed, the fastest-selling book in history. Nonetheless, its “chief consequence,” as John Yudkin noted in 1974, may have been “to antagonize the medical and nutritional establishment.” In fact, Atkins had to antagonize only a very small and select group of men to have a profound and lasting affect on how we think about obesity and weight regulation. In obesity research, particularly in the United States in the 1970s, the established wisdom was determined not by any testing of hypotheses or even establishing of consensus but by the judgment of fewer than a dozen men who dominated the field."

"“It appears that efforts to promote the use of low-calorie and low-fat food products have been highly successful,” Weinsier noted, but the reduction in fat intake did “not appear to have prevented the progression of obesity in the population.”"

"The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations."

"... relatively few people are aware of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns impacted the mountain rivers of the . When I moved to Colorado in 1989, I was impressed by the sparkling water of the mountain rivers, and I too assumed that these were natural, fully functional rivers. It was only after I began to read historical accounts of the Colorado and to examine the streams more closely that I realized how dramatically they had been altered. I began to think of them as virtual rivers, which had the appearance of natural rivers but had lost much of a natural river's ecosystem functions."

"The and its large tributaries historically hosted an extraordinary assemblage of large-river fish species. The , , , , and ) all have morphological adaptation for life in turbid, fast-flowing waters. Most of these species are now or as a result of flow regulation from s, s, and ."

"Behind our house lay a and . Though only a few s, it constituted wilderness to me. Deer, fox, raccoon, s, s, and s inhabited the woods. From the saplings, I culled poles that I used to build s and s. I built a shelter each summer and experimented with , substituting ground beef for . Then, when I was sixteen, our town decided to join the metropolis. The woodland and marsh were obliterated, replaced with a shopping mall, a church, an apartment complex, and a sunken freeway. I could not have been more hurt if a family member had been attacked."

"I often think about maps, because so much of what I do involves measurement. To explain features or processes, you must first describe them. In science the description must be precise and to be accepted, and this requires measurement."

"Throughout human history, people have settled disproportionately along rivers, relying on the rivers for , , fertile agricultural soils, , and food from aquatic and riparian organisms. People have also devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to altering river processes and form. We are not unique in this respect: ecologists refer to various organisms, from to some species of , as s in recognition of the ability of these organisms to alter the surrounding environment. People are unique in the extent to and intensity with which we alter rivers. In many cases, river engineerings has unintended consequences, and effectively mitigating these consequences requires that we understand rivers in the broadest sense, as shapers and integrators of . once described rivers as the gutters down which flow the ruins of continents (Leopold et al., 1964). His father, Aldo Leopold, described the functioning of an ecosystem as a round river to emphasize the cycling of s and energy."

"Rivers are the great shapers of . Rivers transport supplied for hillslope and , in some cases controlling the gradient of the hillslopes (Burbank et al., 1996). As they incise or aggrade to maintain a consistent relationship with their base level, rivers create s that in turn influence local climate; provide travel corridors for animals and humans; and support aquatic and riparian ecosystems that contain some of the Earth's highest levels of biodiversity. ... Although the study of rivers is well-established, the great majority of investigators have worked on the lowland rivers where most people live. Mountain rivers began to receive increasing attention as a subset of rivers only during the last two decades of the twentieth century."

"About the time I was trying to decide what kind of I wanted to be, I took a hike along the canyon of the in central Arizona. I remember looking at the s along the canyon and feeling a quiet pride—and wonder—that I now understood how those sandbars got there and why they were located exactly there. I've always had trouble turning back rather than following just one more bend of the river to see what's ahead. Contemplating those sandbars, I realized I could spend my life following the next bend and the one after that—and the choice was made. I like natural environments. Cities and rural areas, not so much. I also like to read history and biography and tend to make note of relevant river tidbits I come across, such as descriptions of big logjams or abundant beaver dams that travelers described a century ago on rivers that no longer have those features. And I enjoy traveling and seeing new natural places."

"Saving the Dammed is Ellen Wohl's homage to s, describing their unique engineering prowess, the wider environmental impacts they exert, and why we should care. Throughout the book, Wohl binds a lifetime of professional riverine experience, observations of her local beaver population, gray literature, and primary literature to convey the benefits of beavers and convince the reader why we need more beaver-modified ecosystems."

"Psychological science has a great deal to contribute to social welfare in all societies, because the world's most pressing social problems are behavioral in nature—, hunger, , , low worker productivity, poor educational outcomes, and so forth. Thus, psychological research can inform to improve approaches to these important s. The relationship of psychological science to public policy is often troubled, however, by misunderstandings about the role of science in the policy making process. Many scientists fear that their research results will be “misused” by others whose values differ from those of scientists. Thus, psychologists are reluctant to publish research results that can be used to support policies contrary to their own values and hesitate to ask research questions that can generate politically incorrect results. In this article, I argue that psychological science has a primary responsibility to ask dangerous questions and to report results honestly, without fear of their use; that research is not translated directly into public policies; and that psychological science should not be perverted either by fear of political consequences or by compromising truth in a quest for power. Three research examples are given to illustrate the different faces of temptation to pervert psychological science in a misguided hope that scientists' own values will be reflected in public policies."

"This study examines the responses of mothers of girls about similarities and differences of their and . After these measures had been completed and scored, the investigator obtained zygosity diagnoses of the twins made by extensive blood‐group analyses. Of the 61 pairs of twins, 11 were misclassified by their mothers. Despite these mothers’ erroneous beliefs about the zygosity of their twins, they described the twins as having similarities and differences appropriate to their true degree of genetic relatedness."

"Sensory data are filtered through the knowing apparatus of the human senses and made into perceptions and s. The human mind is also constructed in a , and its knowledge is in part created by the social and cultural context in which it comes to know the world. Knowledge of the world is therefore always constructed by the human mind in the working models of reality in the sciences. Fleeting impressions of criminal behavior are elaborated by individuals into complete accounts that they believe to be "true." The wrong people are identified as the criminals, and events are construed in ways that are consistent with the observer's emotions and prejudices. Scientific theories are judged by their persuasive power in the community of scientists. They advance and decline through discussions among scientists. In social and developmental psychology, most of the models specify about human interactions have variables with neither temporal nor directional priorities that can escape challenge."

"There's all of this innate creativity in life,We want to understand that more deeply—and how we can direct and push it toward new forms."

"We all learned in high school biology that frog DNA encodes frogs and human DNA encodes humans. It seems that’s not the case, Whatever genes are doing, it’s more complicated than that."

"In xenobots, the shape … dictates what a xenobot is going to do. It dictates whether it’s going to replicate, how it replicates [and] what it’s going to look like."

"We sliced the robot almost in half and it stitches itself back up and keeps going,And this is something you can't do with typical machines."

"These xenobots are fully biodegradable,when they're done with their job after seven days, they're just dead skin cells."

"These are novel living machines,They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

"The downside of living tissue is that it's weak and it degrades. That's why we use steel. But organisms have 4.5 billion years of practice at regenerating themselves and going on for decades. And when they stop working—death—they usually fall apart harmlessly."

"Throughout history philosophers and mystics have sought a compact key to universal wisdom, a finite formula or text which, when known and understood, would provide the answer to every question. The Bible, the Koran, the mythical secret books of Hermes Trismegistus, and the medieval Jewish Cabala have been so regarded. Sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from casual use by being hard to find, hard to understand when found, and dangerous to use, tending to answer more and deeper questions than the user wishes to ask. Like God the esoteric book is simple yet undescribable, omniscient, and transforms all who know It. The use of classical texts to foretell mundane events is considered superstitious nowadays, yet, in another sense, science is in quest of its own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws which would explain all phenomena. In mathematics, where no set of axioms can hope to prove all true statements, the goal might be a concise axiomatization of all “interesting” true statements."

"Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known of, but not known, through human reason. To know it in detail, one would have to accept its un-computable digit sequence on faith, like words of a sacred text. It embodies an enormous amount of wisdom in a very small space, inasmuch as its first few thousand digits, which could be written on a small piece of paper, contain the answers to more mathematical questions than could be written down in the entire universe, including all interesting finitely-refutable conjectures. Its wisdom is useless precisely because it is universal: the only known way of extracting from Ω the solution to one halting problem, say the Fermat conjecture, is by embarking on a vast computation that would at the same time yield solutions to all other equally simply-stated halting problems, a computation far too large to be carried out in practice. Ironically, although Ω cannot be computed, it might accidentally be generated by a random process, e.g. a series of coin tosses, or an avalanche that left its digits spelled out in the pattern of boulders on a mountainside. The initial few digits of Ω are thus probably already recorded somewhere in the universe. Unfortunately, no mortal discoverer of this treasure could verify its authenticity or make practical use of it."

"Recently I attended a workshop on the study of complexity at which two MIT computer scientists, Tom Toffoli and Norman Margolus, demonstrated the operation of an and gate on a computer monitor. Also watching the show was Charles Bennett of IBM, an expert on the mathematical foundations of computation and complexity. I remarked to Bennett that what we were watching was an electronic computer simulating a cellular automaton simulating a computer. Bennett replied that these successive embeddings of computational logic reminded him of Russian dolls."

"The deep gender bias of science (including medicine), of its very ways of seeing problems, resonates, Keller argues, in its "common rhetoric." Mainly "adversarial" and "aggressive" in its stance toward what it studies, "science can come to sound like a battlefield.""

"The objective world of science has nothing in common with the world of things-in-themselves of the metaphysician. The metaphysical world, assuming that it has any meaning at all, is irrelevant to science."

"... Our popular name of , doubtless arises from the giant size of some of these plants, and I am told that in Japan this prefix sometimes designates an unusually large species. For instance, a monstrous thistle is called devil-thistle. Also a large variety of the particular rhomboidal-shaped Chinese nuts called are popularly known in Japan as devil-hishi. However, with the Japanese as with us, devil may mean "armed," or uncanny in appearance, as the "devil-lotus," one with very prickly leaves. Our well-known , when cultivated in northern Ohio, is somewhat generally known as devil's tongue, which must seem a most fitting name to any one who has imprudently filled the tips of his fingers with the insinuating barbed bristles."

"Briggle. — To be in an uneasy mental condition, to shift the attention rapidly from one thing to another. “Don’t briggle so.” In common use in Ohio. —Fanny D. Bergen, Cambridge, Mass."

"Our are less common with us than the seems to be throughout northern and western Europe. The note of our birds is less peculiar, and therefore it does not seem to have attracted much popular attention. Many intelligent people are acquainted neither the appearance nor the notes of the two species common in the northeastern States. It is therefore not remarkable that our folk-lore should be almost destitute of the wealth of significance attached to the European cuckoo as a fortune-teller, a weather-prophet, a magical creature which can change into a hawk, an immortal and omniscient being."

"Ancestral presumably had abundant, fibrous, heavily , similar to that present in the relictual, leaf-bearing genus '. During the evolutionary radiation of the subfamily , diverse types of bodies and woods arose. Several evolutionary lines have retained an abundant, fibrous wood: all wood cells, even ray cells, have thick lignified walls, and axial is only scanty paratracheal. Aside from a diversity of vessel diameters, there seems to be little protection against during water-stress, and little capacity. This strong wood permits the plants to be tall and to compete for light in their tree-shaded semi-arid habitats. In other evolutionary lines, the wood lacks fibres, and almost all cells have thin, unlignified walls. Vessels occur in an extensive matrix of water-storing parenchyma, and tracheids are also abundant, constituting over half the axial tissue in some species. There is excellent protection against cavitation, but little mechanical support for the plant body; however, these plants are short and occur in extremely arid, unshaded sites. Scandent, vinelike plants of two genera produce a dimorphic wood—while their shoots are extending without external support, they produce fibrous, lignified wood, but after leaning against a host branch, they produce a parenchymatous, unlignified wood."

"s are technically known as angiosperms. Flowers are reproductive structures, some parts produce , which carry sperm cells, other parts have egg cells. During reproduction, new embryos form as part of a seed, and all seeds occur inside fruits. Plants with obvious flowers, such as roses, s, s, and lilies are flowering plants ... But in many other angiosperms, the flowers are tiny and inconspicuous, for example, the flowers of grasses are so small and pale you might never notice them, and the same is true for those of s, s, , and ... Other angiosperms have large, obvious flowers, but they bloom so rarely—at least in cultivation—that many people mistakenly assume that they never flower. are a good example of this: when kept on a , potted cacti may survive and grow without being healthy enough to flower, but in nature they produce spectacular flowers that no one could miss. All angiosperms have s, that is, tissues that conduct water and nutrients from one part of the plant to another."

"Not all s evolve at the same rate, some early species were actually so well adapted that they competed successfully against newer species. are so well suited to life in oceans, lakes, and streams that they still thrive even though most features present in modern, living algae must be more or less identical to those present in the ancestral algae that lived more than 1 billion years ago. Features that seem relatively unchanged are relictual features (technically known as , formerly called primitive features). Like the algae, s are well-adapted to certain habitats and have not changed much in 250 million years; they too have many relictual features. Modern conifers are similar to early ones that arose around 320 millions years ago. The most recently evolved group consists of the flowering plants, which originated about 100 to 120 million years ago with the evolution of several features: flowers, broad, flat, simple leaves, and that conducts water with little friction. The members of the (sunflowers, daisies, and s) ... have many features that evolved recently from features present in ancestral flowering plants. These are derived features (technically known as , formerly called advanced features (i.e., they have been derived evolutionarily from ancient features). One recent (highly derived ) feature in the asters is a . The terms "primitive" and "advanced" are avoided in that they imply inferior and superior."

"The ' lies above the , extending to about 48 or 1 , and is capped by the '. It is a vertically stable, stratified region—hence its name—in which increases with altitude. The ' ("middle sphere") stretches from the stratopause to about 80 km, with temperatures again decreasing with height. The region of transition to interplanetary space, about 80 km, is the '. ... The only region where the incoming is strongly absorbed is in the stratosphere, where absorbs wavelengths. The stratopause marks the level of maximum absorption of solar radiation by ozone, but it is not the location of the greatest ozone concentration. Ozone concentrations generally peak near about 25 km elevation, but much of the ultraviolet radiation has been removed from the incoming solar beam at that level by the ozone above."

"The (AEJ, also known as the West African jet) is a prominent feature of the complicated structure that forms over in summer. ... The jet may be instrumental in creating an environment in which African wave disturbances develop through and instability (e.g., Rennick 1976; Thorncroft and Hoskins 1994a,b) and may play a role in determining the region’s precipitation distribution through these wave disturbances (e.g., Payne and McGarry 1977; Rowell and Milford 1993) or through its role in determining the large-scale column moisture convergence (Rowell et al. 1992). In addition, the African wave disturbances have long been identified as sources of activity in the Atlantic (e.g., Frank 1970). A better understanding of why the jet forms, and its sensitivity to surface conditions, will be useful for understanding the mechanics of the region’s basic climate dynamics as well as its intra- and interannual variability; such an understanding is necessary to advance our prediction capabilities."

"The West African monsoon season begins in late April or early May with the onset of spring rains along the n coast near 4°N. The precipitation maximum remains over the coast until late June or early July. At that time, the rainfall maximum shifts into the southern , near 12°N, often over the course of a few days. This shift in the latitude of the rainfall maximum is known as the West African monsoon jump."

"In the absence of regulation and/or some prohibitive cost attached to the release of es into the , will freedom in the climate commons bring ruin to all? Or will a more complex scenario develop, in which unequal use of the climate commons brings benefit to some and ruin to others?"

"In Hindu lore, each of the three primal gods appeared in many forms. Siva could be Parmeswara. Vishnu could be Narasimha or Venkatarama. They had consorts and relatives, each of whom themselves had, over the centuries, become the objects of worship, the centers of their own cults. Vishnu, for example, was worshipped in the form of his consort Lakshmi, and as the monkey god, Hanuman. Each was endowed with distinct personalities; each gained its own adherents. Some worshippers, certainly, construed those stone figures literally, viewed them as gods, pure and simple, in a way not so different from the grama devata worship of the villages. Indeed, one history of South India spoke of a "fusion of village deities and Vedic Brahminical deities" going back to around the beginning of the Christian era that had brought a comingling of different forms of worship. But sophisticated Hindus, at least, understood that these stone "deities" merely represented forms or facets of a single godhead; in contemplating them, you were reawakened to the Oneness of all things. For those whose worship remained primitive, meanwhile, the garish stone figures could be seen as hooks by which to snare the spiritually unsophisticated and direct them toward something higher and finer. The genius of Hinduism, then, was that it left room for everyone. It was a profoundly tolerant religion. It denied no other faiths. It set out no single path. It prescribed no one canon of worship and belief. It embraced everything and everyone. Whatever your personality there was a god or goddess, an incarnation, a figure, a deity, with which to identify, from which to draw comfort, to rouse you to a higher or deeper spirituality. There were gods for every purpose, to suit any frame of mind, any mood, any psyche, any stage or station of life. In taking on different forms, God became formless; in different names, nameless."

"Those who are deeply religious may look at evolution not as a challenge, but as a true demonstration of the power of the Creator's ingenuity. The vastness and implications of evolution cannot simplify the sense of admiration for a creator who was able to set such a mechanism in motion. Perhaps the Great Architect of the Universe didn't bother to write every single DNA base and acid in the human genome, but that doesn't detract from his incredible intelligence."

"... Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “”) is enough to prevent infection, outbreaks happen."

"The maintain that their ancestors were a seafaring people who have lived in since the dawn of history. This discovery of this man, whom the Tlingit called , was consistent with that they descend from an ancient, coastally adapted people who engaged in long-distance trade."

"In her new book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” Raff beautifully integrates new data from different sciences (archaeology, genetics, linguistics) and different ways of knowing, including Indigenous oral traditions, in a masterly retelling of the story of how, and when, people reached the Americas. While admittedly not an archaeologist herself, Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from , are . She builds a persuasive case with both archaeological and genetic evidence that the path to the Americas was coastal (the ) rather than inland, and that was not a bridge but a homeland — twice the size of Texas — inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the . Throughout, Raff effectively models how science is done, how hypotheses are tested, and how new data are used to refute old ideas and generate new ones."

"Anthropological geneticists should participate in because of the complexity of their work, its implications for human health and societies, and its tendency to be co-opted for particular political or social agendas. They are positioned to offer important contributions to public conversations on issues of race, genetic identity, history, and conflict. There are multiple avenues to public outreach for academics; among them, is a powerful, underused tool."

"Fran loved wild birds. She always had an owl flying in her house. She was always rehabilitating eagles and hawks in her barn."

"In those days, we did a good deal of camping in abandoned houses. spent the first night up in this part of the world in a house. We had him sleep in the living room, because the roof didn’t leak there. And we slept in the kitchen, and we had pans put on the end of the bed. And we could hear the water beating in all night, falling into the pans by our feet."

"A long time ago, thousands of prairie chickens lived in Wisconsin. But as cities grew, the prairie chickens lost their nesting grounds. By 1850, the prairie chicken population began to decrease. In the 1950s, only about 2,500 prairie chickens still lived in Wisconsin. But 2 scientists helped to save them. Those scientists were Frances "Fran" and Frederick Hamerstrom."

"Fran was a very influential biologist in Wisconsin. She worked under and was very instrumental in prairie chicken research and habitat preservation. … she flew and hunted with eagles in the 1960s and 1970s, as a woman. … An Eagle to the Sky .. where she chronicled her adventures with several different eagles, was hugely inspiring to me in pursuing that niche of falconry."

"If you are aware of the actual nest location, it is best to approach it on a path which would lead past the nest. When you are adjacent to the nest, you should turn at right angles to your path of travel, walk directly to the nest and band the nestlings. Once you have banded the nestlings, retrace your steps to your original line of travel. On the return trip from the nest, sprinkle your trail with liberal quantities of crystals. When you reach your original trail, you should again turn at right angles and continue in your original direction of travel ... Thus any predator who picks up and follows your original trail would be discouraged from turning off and following your side trail to the nest. He would be more likely to continue following your trail in your original direction of travel."