Here's an incredibly cool video showing the prow of a massive ice breaking ship as it plows through Antarctica's Ross Sea. The footage is sped up, to pack two months of travel into five minutes. But, unlike a lot of time-lapse videos, this one also has a really informative audio track, in which marine scientist Cassandra Brooks waxes poetic about the many different kinds of ice and explains why she and her team were out there, breaking through the stuff, to begin with.

Bonus: At the end, you get to see the absolute adorableness that is penguins on high-speed fast forward.

Via Deep Sea News

Say you're a marine biologist and you want to study the little bitty creatures of the sea — shrimps and worms and things like that. How do you go about capturing them?

Why, with an underwater vacuum, of course.

At the PNAS First Look blog, David Harris writes that this "SCUBA-tank powered vacuum, called an “airlift,” inhales shrimp, sand fleas, marine worms, and 'things that would swim away if they had the chance.'"

The town of Macapá is in the north of Brazil, on the coast, where the Amazon River flows into the Atlantic. On December 5th, 2001, Sir Peter Blake and his crew decided to spend the night there. They were on their way back to the ocean after a journey down the Amazon, documenting the effects of climate change for the National Geographic Society.

That night, while their guard was down, a group of masked bandits boarded the boat.

When we talk about gun ownership, one of the primary things we talk about is self-defense. Having a gun makes some people feel safer. That’s a perfectly legitimate reason to want a gun, from a personal perspective. But from a public perspective—the place where laws are built—what we want to know is not whether people feel safer with guns, but whether they actually are safer.

The pirates who boarded Peter Blake’s boat had guns. So did Peter Blake. One of the robbers used his gun to threaten the life of a crewmember. Blake used his to shoot the robber in the hand.

But then Blake’s gun jammed. While he tried to get it to work, a second robber shot him in the back, killing him.

No one else on the boat was seriously injured. After the murder, the robbers gathered up what little haul they could—some watches, a couple of cameras, a dinghy with an outboard motor—and fled.

This tragic story illustrates one of the big questions about gun ownership that science can’t yet answer and politicians don’t yet know how to address. Did having a gun make Peter Blake and his crew safer? It’s possible that, had he not fought back and died, the robbers would have hurt more people. Did having a gun make Peter Blake and his crew less safe? It’s possible that, had no man with a rifle emerged from below decks, then the robbers would have just taken their relatively unimportant booty and been on their way.

It’s also completely possible that Blake’s gun, or hypothetical lack thereof, had no real impact on the final outcome. Other factors—the robbers’ desperation, local laws, how the pirates and the crew interacted—might have mattered more.

The fact is, we can speculate, but we don’t know. And not just in this particular instance. On a broad scale, we don’t know whether having more guns makes a society safer, or less safe. Or, really, whether it has any effect at all.

That was the conclusion reached by a panel of experts who reviewed gun research in the United States back in 2004. Since then, the situation hasn’t changed, says Charles Wellford, professor of criminology and criminal justice at The University of Maryland and the panel’s chairman.

But this statement doesn’t mean there hasn’t been research on the subject. In fact, in their report for the National Academy of Sciences, the committee actually wrote that this topic—specifically as it relates to laws that allow law-abiding citizens to carry a gun in public—has “a large body of research” behind it. The problem, the report says, is that none of this research has managed to make a definitive case one way or the other. Many studies exist. Those studies all produced results. It’s not like the scientists finished their papers with, “In conclusion: We aren’t sure.” It’s just that individual papers only tell you so much. To actually understand what’s going on, you have to evaluate that large body of research, as a whole.

Scientists are missing some important bits of data that would help them better understand the effects of gun policy and the causes of gun-related violence. But that’s not the only reason why we don’t have solid answers. Once you have the data, you still have to figure out what it means. This is where the research gets complicated, because the problem isn’t simply about what we do and don’t know right now. The problem, say some scientists, is that we —from the public, to politicians, to even scientists themselves—may be trying to force research to give a type of answer that we can’t reasonably expect it to offer. To understand what science can do for the gun debates, we might have to rethink what “evidence-based policy” means to us.

Research on the relationship between safety and gun ownership dates back to 1997, when economists John Lott and David Mustard published a now-famous paper asserting that right-to-carry laws had drastically reduced violent crime in states that enacted them between 1977 and 1992.

This was not the final word on the subject. Since then, other scientists have published papers critiquing this work—in particular, the fact that the decrease in crime Lott and Mustard found turned out to be complicated by a nationwide decrease in crime that began in roughly the late 1980s. To this day, nobody knows exactly why that decrease happened, but right-to-carry laws can’t explain it. And it makes it hard to say that the decreases in crime Lott and Mustard found were actually related to those laws, and not the larger trend. Some of the critical papers just say that the more guns, less crime hypothesis hasn’t actually been proven. Others, though, assert basically the opposite—that right-to-carry laws have actually increased certain kinds of violent crime.

For the most part, there aren’t a lot of differences in the data that these studies are using. So how can they reach such drastically different conclusions? The issue is in the kind of data that exists, and what you have to do to understand it, says Charles Manski, professor of economics at Northwestern University. Manski studies the ways that other scientists do research and how that research translates into public policy.

“What scientists think of as the best kind of data, you just don’t have that,” he said. This problem goes beyond the missing pieces I told you about in the first part of this series. Even if we did have those gaps filled in, Manski said, what we’d have would still just be observational data, not experimental data.

“We don’t have randomized, controlled experiments, here,” he said. “The only way you could do that, you’d have to assign a gun to some people randomly at birth and follow them throughout their lives. Obviously, that’s not something that’s going to work.”

This means that, even under the best circumstances, scientists can’t directly test what the results of a given gun policy are. The best you can do is to compare what was happening in a state before and after a policy was enacted, or to compare two different states, one that has the policy and one that doesn’t. And that’s a pretty inexact way of working.

To understand this problem a little better, let’s take a look at something totally unrelated to gun policy—body piercings.

Pick a random person—someone in your office, maybe, or a passerby out on the street. It doesn’t really matter whom. But once you’ve chosen them, you have a job to do. You need to count the number of piercings they have.

Up front, this seems pretty simple. You can easily see whether your person is wearing earrings, or if she has a nose stud. But it gets harder when we start talking about the potential piercings that aren’t easily observable. For the sake of this experiment, you’re not allowed to strip your person down to their skivvies. And you can’t just go ask them, either. After a certain point, you are going to have to start making assumptions. If your person is wearing a three-piece business suit and has no visible piercings, you might decide that there’s a good chance they aren’t hiding any, either. If you have reason to suspect that your person has a nipple pierced, then you can reason that, most likely, they have both nipples pierced.

Add in enough assumptions, and you can eventually come up with an estimate. But is the estimate correct? Is it even close to reality? That’s a hard question to answer, because the assumptions you made—the correlations you drew between cause and effect, what you know and what you assume to be true because of that—might be totally wrong.

For instance, John Donohue, professor of law at Stanford University, is one of those researchers who think having more guns on the street increases the risk of aggravated assaults. Basically, he thinks that guns are more likely to escalate a tense situation than to diffuse it or prevent it from happening in the first place. But the 2004 National Academies report came to the conclusion that he’d not proved his case any more than Lott and Mustard had proven theirs. And this is why. When I spoke with Donohue, he acknowledged that he could be missing factors in his analysis of the data and that cause and effect might not be tied together in the way he thinks they are.

“There’s always the apprehension that the states that pass [right-to-carry laws] also happen to be the states that were more likely to do a better job of counting aggravated assaults,” he said. “Or maybe those are the state that have laws requiring police to prosecute batters. Things like that could muddy up the results.” It’s hard to tease apart the effect of one specific change, compared to the effects of other things that could be happening at the same time.

This process of taking the observational data we do have and then running it through a filter of assumptions plays out in the real world in the form of statistical modeling. When the NAS report says that nobody yet knows whether more guns lead to more crime, or less crime, what they mean is that the models and the assumptions built into those models are all still proving to be pretty weak.

In fact, that’s the key problem at the heart of the debate over whether more guns means less or more crime, John Pepper said. Pepper is an economics professor at The University of Virginia, and one of the researchers involved in the 2004 NAS report. He’s written articles criticizing the methods of both John Lott and John Donohue and he said that he sees this particular branch of research as locked in a sort of spinning wheel—constantly producing variations on a theme, but never able to answer the questions correctly. From either side of the debate, he said, scientists continue to produce wildly different conclusions using the same data. On either side, small shifts in the assumptions lead the models to produce different results. Both factions continue to choose sets of assumptions that aren’t terribly logical. It’s as if you decided that anybody with blue shoes probably had a belly-button piercing. There’s not really a good reason for making that correlation. And if you change the assumption—actually, belly-button piercings are more common in people who wear green shoes—you end up with completely different results.

“It’s been a complete waste of time, because we can’t validate one model versus another,” Pepper said. Most likely, he thinks that all of them are wrong. For instance, all the models he’s seen assume that a law will affect every state in the same way, and every person within that state in the same way. “But if you think about it, that’s just nonsensical,” he said.

What you’re left with is an environment where it’s really easy to prove that your colleague’s results are probably wrong, and it’s easy for him to prove that yours are probably wrong. But it’s not easy for either of you to make a compelling case for why you’re right.

Statistical modeling isn’t unique to gun research. It just happens to be particularly messy in this field. Scientists who study other topics have done a better job of using stronger assumptions and of building models that can’t be upended by changing one small, seemingly randomly chosen detail. It’s not that, in these other fields, there’s only one model being used, or even that all the different models produce the exact same results. But the models are stronger and, more importantly, the scientists do a better job of presenting the differences between models and drawing meaning from them.

“Climate change is one of the rare scientific literatures that has actually faced up to this,” Charles Manski said.

What he means is that, when scientists model climate change, they don’t expect to produce exact, to-the-decimal-point answers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces these big reports periodically, which analyze lots of individual papers. In essence, they’re looking at lots of trees and trying to paint you a picture of the forest. IPCC reports are available for free online, you can go and read them yourself. When you do, you’ll notice something interesting about the way that the reports present results.

The IPCC never says, “Because we burned fossil fuels and emitted carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then the Earth will warm by x degrees.” Instead, those reports present a range of possible outcomes … for everything. Depending on the different models used, different scenarios presented, and the different assumptions made, the temperature of the Earth might increase by anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.

On the one hand, that leaves politicians in a bit of a lurch. The response you might mount to counteract a 1.5 degree increase in global average temperature is pretty different from the response you’d have to 4.5 degrees. On the other hand, the range does tell us something valuable: the temperature is increasing.

Now, you could fiddle with the dials to produce a more exact result. That’s perfectly possible. But, in doing so, you might have to settle on a set of assumptions that don’t necessarily reflect reality. You can increase the pinpoint accuracy of your result. Unfortunately, you might do so at the expense of the reliability of that result.

But that is is precisely what gun research tends to do, Manski and Pepper said. “Policy makers don’t like ranges. You don’t get called in front of Congress to testify with a range,” Pepper said.

What might a range look like, applied to crime and violence? As a hypothetical, let’s think about the impact of having a death penalty. We don’t really know whether the death penalty saves innocent lives or not, Manski said. But with some work, we could theoretically get down to a range. We could say something like, “The impact of the death penalty could fall anywhere between saving five innocent lives and losing two.” That’s the kind of range you’d get when you’re talking about whether more guns means more or less crime.

How do you get there? Manski explained it as a process; you start out looking at your data with no assumptions at all. If we were counting body piercings, we’d only be looking at the ones we can see with our own two eyes. Then you slowly add in only the strongest possible assumptions—the piercings you can kind of see an outline of through clothing. That gives you a range of possible answers. “These ranges tell you something, but not an awful lot,” Manski said. “So now let’s start thinking about what assumptions might be believable and what do they buy me?” Try adding a few assumptions with really strong logic behind them—somebody with multiple face piercings is likely to have more than one non-visible piercing. Bit by bit, you can narrow down the range, in a believable way, until you get something like, “This person probably has between 1 and 4 piercings. “ To narrow down even further, you might look at the ranges produced by a couple of different models, and see where they overlap. “You lay out a whole menu of results. It’s different from the present research, which is done in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion,” Manski said.

The problem with this is that it flies in the face of what most of us expect science to do for public policy. Politics is inherently biased, right? The solutions that people come up with are driven by their ideologies. Science is supposed to cut that Gordian Knot. It’s supposed to lay the evidence down on the table and impartially determine who is right and who is wrong.

But how do those expectations apply if the best answer we can actually get to the question of whether guns make us safer is something along the lines of, “The likely effects of right-to-carry laws range from saving 500 lives annually to costing 500 lives annually.”

Manski and Pepper say that this is where we need to rethink what we expect science to do. Science, they say, isn’t here to stop all political debate in its tracks. In a situation like this, it simply can’t provide a detailed enough answer to do that—not unless you’re comfortable with detailed answers that are easily called into question and disproven by somebody else with a detailed answer.

Instead, science can reliably produce a range of possible outcomes, but it’s still up to the politicians (and, by extension, up to us) to hash out compromises between wildly differing values on controversial subjects. When it comes to complex social issues like gun ownership and gun violence, science doesn’t mean you get to blow off your political opponents and stake a claim on truth. Chances are, the closest we can get to the truth is a range that encompasses the beliefs of many different groups.

“In politics, being evidence-based isn’t as simple as science telling you exactly what you should do,” Manski said. “I see scientists promising stuff they can’t deliver. You have people saying they know for sure, but the way they know is by making assumptions that have really low credibility.”

Photos: Reuters / Nick Adams and Andrew Winning ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/07/guns.html/feed 103 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/05/wikipedia-and-libraries-a-mat.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/05/wikipedia-and-libraries-a-mat.html#comments Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:43:29 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=216619 John Mark Ockerbloom's "From Wikipedia to our libraries" is a fabulous proposal for creating research synergies between libraries and Wikipedia, by adding templates to Wikipedia articles that direct readers to unique, offline-only (or onsite-only) library resources at their favorite local libraries. Ockerbloom's approach acknowledges and respects the fact that patrons start their searches online, and seeks only to improve the outcomes of their research -- not to convince them not to start with the Internet.

So how do we get people from Wikipedia articles to the related offerings of our local libraries? Essentially we need three things: First, we need ways to embed links in Wikipedia to the libraries that readers use. (We can’t reasonably add individual links from an article to each library out there, because there are too many of them– there has to be a way that each Wikipedia reader can get to their own favored libraries via the same links.) Second, we need ways to derive appropriate library concepts and local searches from the subjects of Wikipedia articles, so the links go somewhere useful. Finally, we need good summaries of the resources a reader’s library makes available on those concepts, so the links end up showing something useful. With all of these in place, it should be possible for researchers to get from a Wikipedia article on a topic straight to a guide to their local library’s offerings on that topic in a single click.

I’ve developed some tools to enable these one-click Wikipedia -> library transitions. For the first thing we need, I’ve created a set of Wikipedia templates for adding library links. The documentation for the Library resources box template, for instance, describes how to use it to create a sidebar box with links to resources about (or by) the topic of a Wikipedia article in a reader’s library, or in another library a reader might want to consult. (There’s also an option for direct links to my Online Books Page, if there are relevant books online; it may be easier in some cases for readers to access those than to access their local library’s books.)

From Wikipedia to our libraries (via Making Light)

(Image: library card, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from raqkat's photostream) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/05/wikipedia-and-libraries-a-mat.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/28/how-will-the-sequester-affect.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/28/how-will-the-sequester-affect.html#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:55:41 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=215963 the details are what's important here. Tom Levenson explains the short-term and long-term impacts.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/28/how-will-the-sequester-affect.html/feed 15 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/18/a-brief-history-of-space-monke.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/18/a-brief-history-of-space-monke.html#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:46:30 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=213808 In reality, their work was part of an elaborate cover-up masking a spy satellite program. At The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson reports on some fascinating space history. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/18/a-brief-history-of-space-monke.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/09/take-a-survey-to-help-scientis.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/09/take-a-survey-to-help-scientis.html#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 21:08:36 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=204867 how people use houses — what we cook in them and how we cook it. You can help by taking this quick, anonymous survey. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/09/take-a-survey-to-help-scientis.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/lead-and-violent-crime.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/lead-and-violent-crime.html#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:21:58 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=204539 connections between leaded gasoline and the crime wave of the mid 20th century. That's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis with a lot of correlational evidence. But it's not proof. I recommend reading public health researcher Scott Firestone's excellent article that delves into the details of the studies from the Mother Jones story. It's a great look at the lines between public health as a science and public health as activism and it helps shine some light on why seemingly airtight cases aren't always immediately acted upon. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/lead-and-violent-crime.html/feed 22 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/science-confidential.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/08/science-confidential.html#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:56:54 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=204532 We've talked here before about the crazy things you can find when you read the "Methods" section of a scientific research paper.]]>

We've talked here before about the crazy things you can find when you read the "Methods" section of a scientific research paper. (Ostensibly, that's the boring part.)

If you want a quick laugh this morning — or if you want to get a peek at how the sausages are made — check out the Twitter hashtag #overlyhonestmethods, where scientists are talking about the backstory behind seemingly dry statements like "A population of male rats was chosen for this study".

The stuff you use to make sex a little more smooth might have some serious drawbacks. Nothing has been proven yet — most of the data comes from disembodied cell cultures and animal testing, which doesn't necessarily give you an accurate picture of what's happening in humans — but several studies over the last few years have drawn connections between lubricant use and increased rates of STD transmission. (It also looks like some lubricants might kill off natural vaginal flora — the good bacteria that live "up there" and make the difference between a healthy vagina and, say, a raging yeast infection.)

Some of these studies have provided evidence suggesting that the ingredients in lubricants damage the cells lining the vagina and rectum — which would explain why those lubricants might facilitate STD transmission.

At Chemical and Engineering News, Lauren Wolf has a really well-researched, well-written story that will give you the low-down on this research without hype and without fear-mongering. Her story is easy to understand and explains what we know, what we don't know, and why this matters (besides the obvious, lubricants have been proposed as a possible means of applying topical anti-microbial STD preventatives).

Right now, the Food & Drug Administration doesn’t typically require testing of personal lubricants in humans. The agency classifies them as medical devices, so the sex aids have to be tested on animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Rectal use of lubricants is viewed by the agency as an “off-label” application—use at your own risk.

Questions about lubricant safety arose nearly a decade ago when micro­bicide developers were testing whether the detergent nonoxynol-9 could block HIV transmission. Manufacturers had been incorporating the compound into spermicidal lubricants for years because of its ability to punch holes in the cell membranes of sperm. In 2002, however, a Phase II/III clinical trial of a nonoxynol-9 vaginal gel failed to protect women from HIV infection. Not only that, but the detergent actually increased the risk of HIV infection in the sex workers tested—women living in countries such as South Africa and Thailand who used the product three or four times per day.

Lab work eventually revealed the reason for the paradoxical increase: Nonoxynol-9 is so good at punching holes in cell membranes that it not only bores into sperm but also into the cells lining the vagina and rectum. The mucosal lining of the vagina is a good barrier to infection all by itself, says Richard A. Cone, a biophysicist at Johns Hopkins University. But if that barrier gets compromised, all bets are off, he explains. After nonoxynol-9—still used on some condoms today—went from promising microbicide candidate to malevolent cell killer, scientists like Cone began to question the safety of other supposedly innocuous spermicide and personal lubricant ingredients.

Read the full story

Image: Beer Lube?, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 28096801@N05's photostream

Last week, after giving myself an initial overview of the scientific research on how gun ownership and gun laws affect violent crime, I told you that it seems like there's not a solid consensus on this issue. At least not in the United States. Different studies, of different laws, in different places seem to produce a wide variety of results.

On the one hand, this is kind of to be expected with social science. People are hard to pin down. Harder, often, than the Higgs Boson particle. And you can't just do a clean, controlled laboratory study of these issues. Instead, you're left trying to compare specific places, laws, and enforcement techniques that may not be easily comparable, in an attempt to draw a broad conclusion. That's hard.

But, it seems, the National Rifle Association has gone out of its way to make this work even more difficult than it would otherwise be. Since the early 1990s, NRA-backed politicians have attacked firearms research they believe is biased against guns. Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon.com wrote a piece on this back in July, after an earlier mass shooting. He describes how a vaguely worded clause has lead researchers to avoid doing firearms studies at all, for fear of losing their funding.

The Centers for Disease Control funds research into the causes of death in the United States, including firearms — or at least it used to. In 1996, after various studies funded by the agency found that guns can be dangerous, the gun lobby mobilized to punish the agency. First, Republicans tried to eliminate entirely the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the bureau responsible for the research. When that failed, Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, successfully pushed through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget (the amount it had spent on gun research in the previous year) and outlawed research on gun control with a provision that reads: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

Dickey’s clause, which remains in effect today, has had a chilling effect on all scientific research into gun safety, as gun rights advocates view “advocacy” as any research that notices that guns are dangerous. Stephen Teret, who co-directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told Salon: “They sent a message and the message was heard loud and clear. People [at the CDC], then and now, know that if they start going down that road, their budget is going to be vulnerable. And the way public agencies work, they know how this works and they’re not going to stick their necks out.”

In January, the New York Times reported that the CDC goes so far as to “ask researchers it finances to give it a heads-up anytime they are publishing studies that have anything to do with firearms. The agency, in turn, relays this information to the NRA as a courtesy.”

Read the rest

Via Dave Ng

Image: IMG_0362, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from neontommy's photostream

Does gun control mean fewer guns on the street and less violence? Does encouraging gun ownership mean better protected people and less violence?

I don't think it's too early to be asking questions like this. When you're faced with a tragedy like what happened today at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it's reasonable to start asking questions about violence prevention. It's part of the bargaining stage of grief — wondering if there's something we could have done that would have prevented all those needless deaths. And let's get one thing straight: Everybody wants to prevent what happened today.

So what can be done about it? And what does the science say?

I've been trying to get a handle on that for the last hour or so and here are three things it seems we can definitively say:

• It would be completely accurate for someone to tell you that studies in places like Australia and Austria found that implementing more stringent gun control laws reduced deaths from gun-related suicides and violent crime.

• It would also be accurate to say that a study of the effects of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in the United States showed no big reductions in gun-related deaths, except for suicides among people older than 55.

• And it's also true that a 2003 study of conceal-carry laws in Florida found that they seemed to make no difference one way or the other — neither increasing nor reducing rates of violent crime.

Yes, this looks like it's going to be one of those moments where science cannot provide you a clear-cut, absolute answer.

The issue is that studying the impact of gun laws on violent crime isn't really the single, simple question that it appears to be. Instead, we're talking about many different individual laws, written in different ways and enforced in different manners. One law might fail while another succeeds. How do you compare them?

Where those laws are implemented is also a factor, because a new, stringent gun law in a place surrounded by similar laws is likely to have a different outcome than the same law in a place where you can quickly cross a border and find completely different legislation. It's also not unreasonable to suspect that culture and other local factors play a part. There appear to be big differences in the number of violent gun deaths between geographic regions of the United States.

Some studies are funded by biased institutions. Some studies aren't peer reviewed. Some studies feature poorly thought-out methodology.

All of that leads to a mess of frequently contradictory conclusions that can, frankly, be used to support just about any position you'd like to put forward. So, basically, just because you can support your position, don't think that makes you absolutely correct.

And that leads me to another key theme that kept coming up on Google Scholar — if we really want to prevent deaths from violent crime we need to come to terms with the fact that most people reach their conclusions about the best way to do that with almost no help from science. In fact, I found multiple researchers who argued that solving our national debate about guns and about how to prevent violent crime had very little to do with the science anyway. It would be nice to know what's actually going on. But it really may not matter much in at a practical level.

Regardless of who you are and what you believe, when you start looking at the sociology of this, you'll find that statistics probably don't matter to you. Tribal affiliation does. Here's how Donald Braman — associate professor at George Washington University Law School — and Dan Kahan — professor at Yale Law School — put it in 2006:

For one segment of American society, guns symbolize honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency. By opposing gun control, individuals affirm the value of these meanings and the vision of the good society that they construct. For another segment of American society, however, guns connote something else: the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers. These individuals instinctively support gun control as a means of repudiating these significations and of promoting an alternative vision of the good society that features equality, social solidarity, and civilized nonagression.

These competing cultural visions, we will argue, are what drive the gun control debate. They are what dispose individuals to accept certain empirically grounded public-safety arguments and to reject others. Indeed, the meanings that guns and gun control express are sufficient to justify most individuals’ positions on gun control independently of their beliefs about guns and safety. It follows that the only meaningful gun control debate is one that explicitly addresses whether and how the underlying cultural visions at stake should be embodied in American law.

Statistics don't convince people. People convince people.

And this fits pretty well with what we know about how people make up their minds on a whole host of divisive issues. We tend to find people we identify with and believe what they believe. When we change our minds, it's usually because our group's values changed. Or because someone (someone we felt we could identify with, even if they weren't a part of our group) convinced us that a new idea fit better into our group's values than we'd previously thought. Or that our values fit better in a different group than the one we currently belonged to.

If all of this sounds familiar, that's because I wrote a piece on this very subject for The New York Times magazine back in August. Same concept. Different application.

But even in Washington, understanding the power of stories could go a long ways toward bridging gaps that only get bigger when we expect those who disagree to rationally accept data and evidence. “We fight it out by throwing arguments at each other and are upset when they have no effect,” Haidt says. “It makes us accuse our opponents of bad faith and ulterior motives. But the truth is that our minds just aren’t set up to be changed by mere evidence and argument presented by a ‘stranger.’”

And now here's the part where I editorialize. Want to prevent gun violence and reduce the number of horrific events like what happened today? Great. Go stop being strangers to each other. Everybody wants the same thing here. Nobody has tapped into any ineffable truths about how to get there. If we want to hash this out in the political and socio/cultural sphere, we're going to have to stop vilifying the people who disagree with us and start trying to talk about how we can all solve the problems we want to solve while remaining true to our own values.

Image: IMG_0362, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from neontommy's photostream

Is coffee bad for you or good for you? Does acupuncture actually work, or does it produce a placebo effect? Do kids with autism have different microbes living in their intestines, or are their gut flora largely the same as neurotypical children? These are all good examples of topics that have produced wildly conflicting results from one study to another. (Side-note: This is why knowing what a single study says about something doesn't actually tell you much. And, frankly, when you have a lot of conflicting results on anything, it's really easy for somebody to pick the five that support a given hypothesis and not tell you about the 10 that don't.)

But why do conflicting results happen? One big factor is experimental design. Turns out, there's more than one way to study the same thing. How you set up an experiment can have a big effect on the outcome. And if lots of people are using different experimental designs, it becomes difficult to accurately compare their results. At the Wonderland blog, Emily Anthes has an excellent piece about this problem, using the aforementioned research on gut flora in kids with autism as an example.

For instance, in studies of autism and microbes, investigators must decide what kind of control group they want to use. Some scientists have chosen to compare the guts of autistic kids to those of their neurotypical siblings while others have used unrelated children as controls. This choice of control group can influence the strength of the effect that researchers find–or whether they find one at all.

Scientists also know that antibiotics can have profound and long-lasting effects on our microbiomes, so they agree on the need to exclude children from these studies who have taken antibiotics recently. But what’s recently? Within the last week? Month? Three months? Each investigator has to make his or her own call when designing a study.

Then there’s the matter of how researchers collect their bacterial samples. Are they studying fecal samples? Or taking samples from inside the intestines themselves? The bacterial communities may differ in samples taken from different places.

Read the full story at The Wonderland blog

Sometimes, it's hard to find people interested in playing the role of guinea pig for the sake of science. And, sometimes, that job is not so hard. Like when what you want the guinea pigs to do is get real high. That's a good example.

Pot-based research isn't all fun and games. Given the interest in medical marijuana for cancer patients and people with AIDS, some of the studies require volunteers to, you know, have cancer or AIDS. Others are interested in the sociology — these scientists want to talk to you about your pot use and collect data about how it may or may not have affected your life.

But the mythical opportunity to "get high for science" really does exist, writes Brian Palmer at Slate.

The National Institutes of Health maintains an online database of clinical trials that are in the recruitment process. As of this writing, there are approximately 100 marijuana studies currently enrolling patients. Each listing contains inclusion criteria (the types of people the researchers are looking for) and exclusion criteria (characteristics that will remove otherwise qualified people from contention).

... there are a few trials that might interest someone looking for a free high. Consider the University of Iowa’s “Effects of Inhaled Cannabis on Driving Performance.” Participants will be dosed with varying amounts of alcohol or vaporized cannabis, then placed into a driving simulator to measure their performance. There are some restrictions. You must be a social drinker and marijuana user already, but you can’t have an addiction. People who are susceptible to motion sickness are out, and you must live near the driving simulator in Iowa. Keep in mind that getting into the study doesn’t guarantee free marijuana—two control groups will get no THC whatsoever. (Previous studies have shown that low doses of marijuana have little to no impact on driving performance.)

Read more at Slate.com

Let's talk about the pay gap. Census data show shows that, in 2008, American women still earned .77 cents for every $1 earned by American men. And, while some of this has to do with women working different jobs then men, working less hours, or spending less of their lives moving up the corporate ladder, numerous studies have shown that the disparity still exists even after you've controlled for all those factors, and more. Even in the same job, at the same level of experience, the same education, same race, same hours worked, etc. ... women still earn less than men do.

There's been lots of research aimed at explaining the gap, and it's probably tied to more than one factor. But several studies have shown that unfair bias against women — whether intended or subconscious — is part of it. Last week, researchers at Princeton published a study that showed bias against women in hiring practices within the sciences and hit on some particularly interesting aspects of subconscious discrimination.

The researchers gave the same application materials and resume to two sets of scientists and told the scientists to evaluate the candidate for a position as laboratory manager. Half the scientists got the materials with a male name attached. Half saw a female name. The scientists gave the male name a higher rating on competency, hireability, and their own willingness to mentor "him". They also offered "him" a higher starting salary — $30,238, compared to $26,507 for the female name.

The catch: These trends held regardless of whether the scientist doing the hiring was male or female, and none of the scientists used sexist language or sexist arguments as justification for their decisions. At the Unofficial Prognosis blog, Ilana Yurkiewicz explains why those details are so important:

When scientists judged the female applicants more harshly, they did not use sexist reasoning to do so. Instead, they drew upon ostensibly sound reasons to justify why they would not want to hire her: she is not competent enough. Sexism is an ugly word, so many of us are only comfortable identifying it when explicitly misogynistic language or behavior is exhibited. But this shows that you do not need to use anti-women language or even harbor conscious anti-women beliefs to behave in ways that are effectively anti-women.

Practically, this fact makes it all the more easy for women to internalize unfair criticisms as valid. If your work is rejected for an obviously bad reason, such as “it’s because you’re a woman,” you can simply dismiss the one who rejected you as biased and therefore not worth taking seriously. But if someone tells you that you are less competent, it’s easy to accept as true. And why shouldn’t you? Who wants to go through life constantly trying to sort through which critiques from superiors are based on the content of your work, and which are unduly influenced by the incidental characteristics of who you happen to be? Unfortunately, too, many women are not attuned to subtle gender biases. Making those calls is bound to be a complex and imperfect endeavor. But not recognizing it when it’s happening means accepting: “I am not competent.” It means believing: “I do not deserve this job.”

So how do you deal with subconscious sexism? Yurkiewicz' full post is a must-read, and offers some solutions.

Also check out:
• Physicist Sean Carroll's post on the same study
• The study itself at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Wikipedia on male-female income disparity in the United States

The Joides Resolution is a large boat—more than 450 feet long and almost 70 feet wide. That's small compared to a lot of cruise ships, but big enough to house and feed and provide work space for 126 people. It's a floating city, with a movie theater, helipad, hospital, cafeteria, laboratories, and a giant drilling rig. But even a big boat can start to feel small when you have nowhere else to go, and no land in sight, for two whole months.

Some science can't be done on shore, and the Joides Resolution is one of the tools researchers use to learn more about the world beneath the waves. The ship travels the globe, serving as a mobile research station for scientists who want to study the bottom of the sea.

Between June 2 and August 1, 2012, a team of researchers, technicians, and support staff took the Joides Resolution north, to the cold waters off Newfoundland. Their goal: Collect samples of mud, clay, and muck from the ocean floor. Using a deep-sea drilling system, they lowered thousands of feet of pipe through the water, and forced it into the sea floor below. When the pipes were pulled back up on deck, they contained core samples—cylindrical logs that allowed the scientists to see layer after layer of sediment. By looking at what those cores are made of, the chemistry they contain, and the physical fossils buried deep inside them, researchers can begin to reconstruct what Earth's climate must have been like tens of millions of years ago.

On July 11th, while the Joides Resolution was still at sea, I got to interview several of the scientists on board. Paleontologist Richard Norris, geochemist Jessica Whiteside, and sedimentologist Chris Junium (along with communications officer Caitlin Scully) talked to me about their research, what they hoped to learn, and what it was like to live in a laboratory far from home.

These are the tubes that are driven vertically into the sea floor by the Joides Resolution's drilling rig. They'll come back up full of sediment from the bottom of the ocean.

You can listen to my full interview with the scientists via Soundcloud—or download it as a podcast. It's almost an hour long, but you'll learn a lot about how the scientists (and the rest of the crew) work, how they live, and what they study. I think it's interesting to hear this story straight from the people who are experiencing it, especially when you're talking about an experience that simultaneously brings together with an incredibly diverse group of people, while also thoroughly cutting them off from the rest of humanity.

In a lot of ways, the Joides Resolution is like the research stations in Antarctica. Truly an international effort—"more international than the International Space Station," as Richard Norris put it—it's also interdisciplinary. Scientists literally cannot do this kind of work on their own. In order for a science team of 30-some people to function, they have to work alongside 20 technicians and more than 70 crew members, including cooks, electricians, and welders. It creates a different sort of community and a different sort of environment than what you'd find in a lab on land. At the same time, as Chris Junium describes, everyone on that boat is very far away from their friends and their family for a very long time.

This is the Moon Pool, which the researchers talk about in the interview. It's a hole that goes all the way through the ship, creating a pool of sea water on the deck of the Joides Resolution. Besides serving as a launching port for underwater research vessels, the Moon Pool is also necessary for the drilling operations. The drilling pipes are so heavy that they can't be lowered over the side of the ship. If you did that, the whole thing would list. Instead, the drill goes down through the Moon Pool, down through the center of the ship, itself, keeping the weight balanced and the boat afloat.

We've also got a series of videos that will allow you to see some of the stuff the scientists talk about in the interview (and give you a way to hit the highlights without listening to an hour-long podcast).

In the first film, you'll meet some of the people who spent two months on board the Joides Resolution this summer, and get an inside look at what their lives were like.

The second film shows you how the crew of the Joides Resolution went about collecting those all-important samples of sea-floor sediment. It's not as simple as you might think. The Joides Resolution does its drilling in deep water. It can't anchor. Instead, the boat has to be carefully positioned so it doesn't twist and torque the drilling pipes as it moves on the surface of the water.

Finally, what do the scientists do with those sea-floor samples once they've got them? This last video follows the core samples from the ocean to the lab. You'll see how researchers keep track of hundreds and hundreds of tubes of muck, and find out how they make sense of what they're seeing. You'll also get to meet the Green Monster—a thick and frustratingly persistent layer of mud much younger than the sediments the researchers were hoping to find.

Learn more about Joides Resolution Expedition 342

See more photos from the trip

Watch more videos made on board the Joides Resolution

Good news for ladies who like the woods—your period is (probably) not something that attracts (most) bears.

There are not a lot of studies addressing this particular topic, but a National Park Service paper published this year took a look at all of them and put the scattered pieces information together into a single puzzle. It's probably not a complete picture, but it's certainly better than hearsay and random, sexist stories you heard from your grandpa's drinking buddy. More importantly, even when there is a documented risk between menstrual blood and bears, that shouldn't be construed as a reason to keep women out of the wilderness. After all, bears are attracted to food, and we don't tell people they shouldn't eat while backpacking. Instead, we have practices that reduce risk. Same thing applies here.

Here's what we learn:
1) You can menstruate freely and without fear in the contiguous 48 United States. Grizzlies, and particularly black bears, don't seem to be interested in what's happening in your pants. Evaluating hundreds of grizzly attacks found no correlation between menstruation and risk of attack. In the case of black bears, this has actually been tested experimentally, with researchers leaving used tampons from various stages of menstruation out in the wilderness and watching how the bears respond. (Science!) The bears completely ignored the tampons.

2) Yellowstone data suggests food is a much bigger risk than menstruation. Analysis of bear attack data from Yellowstone National Park doesn't even consider attacks that happened before 1980. Why? Because that was before stringent rules on in-park food storage and bear feeding. The vast majority of pre-1980 attacks are already known to be related to bears seeking out human food. Meanwhile, between 1980 and 2011 only 9 women have been injured by bears in Yellowstone. Of those, six were incidents where women and bears ran into each other unexpectedly on hiking trails. In the other three incidents, which didn't rely on the element of surprise and are, thus, more likely to have attraction factors involved none of the women were menstruating at the time of the attack.

3) Polar bears are a whole 'nother story. Two different polar bear studies, one in captivity and one in the wild, have shown that those bears are attracted to human menstrual blood—even more than plain old human blood that wasn't related to menstruation. They are also attracted to the scent of seals and (again) human food.

Big picture: Food still seems to be a bigger issue in bear attacks than menstruating ladies. And, as with food, the Park Service has guidelines that you can follow for how to best deal with tampons while in the wilderness.

Read the full National Parks Service report, including the safety guidelines for women on their periods

Via Mother Nature Network

Meet Richard Nolan: quartermaster of the Whydah, captain of the Anne, former coworker of Blackbeard—in general, pirate. He is also—at least through Labor Day—my friend Butch Roy.

Butch is an actor, a founder of the Twin Cities Improv Festival, and the executive director of Huge Theater here in Minneapolis. This summer, he took on a new role, playing pirate Richard Nolan in the Science Museum of Minnesota's Real Pirates exhibit.

When I first heard about Real Pirates I wasn't terribly excited. It sounded like the sort of kiddie-friendly, fact-lite thing that I tend to avoid on museum trips. I mean, for god's sake, there were actors running around going, "Arrgh," at people. But then I got a chance to talk to Butch about what, exactly, he was doing in the exhibit—and what it took to prepare for the role.

Butch and his cohorts aren't just playing pirates—they're playing real, documented people. What's more, all the actors had to build their characters from the ground up, using original historical sources and doing a lot of extra research on their own. They had to learn the skills of a pirate and the skills associated with their specific role on the ship. Butch, at least in theory, now knows how to load and fire an 18th century cannon. His fellow actor Michael Ritchie, who plays ship's surgeon James Ferguson, is up-to-date on all the latest medical research and techniques, circa 1717. The sheer volume of historical information Butch has picked up is absolutely fascinating.

I have no idea whether or not the actual exhibit, Real Pirates, is worthwhile as an educational tool. But you should DEFINITELY find one of the pretend pirates and take them out for a beer.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: I was kind of surprised to find that this whole exhibit was centered around a real pirate ship—the Whydah. And your character, Richard Nolan, is actually somebody who was on that ship. How do we know all of this?

Butch Roy: The Whydah is the only confirmed pirate shipwreck ever recovered. There are other ships that were rumored to be pirate ships. And there were other confirmed ships that went down—but mostly your salvage crews would raid those readily. This was a pretty famous ship that was a pirate ship when it was lost, and it stayed lost until Barry Clifford found it off the coast of Cape Cod. [Clifford is an underwater explorer. He found the wreck of the Whydah in 1984.—MKB]

The interesting thing is that everybody knew the Whydah was out there all along, they just couldn't find it. The bottom of the Cape is very sandy and it shifts enough to just swallow everything that sinks. Clifford found the wreck and he found the ship's bell with the name of the ship cast into it, which is how this wreck is verified. That's generally the problem, not finding artifacts, but confirming which ship the artifacts came from.

BR: First off, there were a couple of survivors of the wreck, from the Whydah and the other ships. This was actually a small flotilla of ships and two went down. The survivors were later arrested, including my character, who was captaining one of the other ships.

This is actually one of the places where the story sort of branches into legend—why the ships were off Cape Cod to begin with. The captain of the Whydah was Sam Bellamy, and he had his lover and child in Massachusetts. The story goes that he wasn’t allowed to marry her because he was poor, so he went off to join a salvage crew and then became a pirate and got rich. The legend is that he was wealthy now and was about to get out of piracy and take his love away and marry her. So Cape Cod wasn’t necessarily the destination, it was just as far as they made it. There was a huge 'Noreaster that they basically sailed right into. And the ship was heavily loaded at the time, so it was already riding low.

Our timeline also develops from trial documents. There was a huge press to put an end to piracy. So when the survivors were arrested they would be pressed for who was on your crew, when did you join, which ships were on, who else was on those ships. We can cross-reference it all from person to person and you can see who jumped to the ships and when and where they went from there. The Whydah was originally a slave ship that was owned by a company in Europe and would have been insured, so we know when it was taken by pirates [February 1717] and who would have been on board then. [The wreck happened April 26, 1717]

BR: It was a six-week process altogether. There was some information all of us had to learn—the basics of navigation, nautical tradition, world affairs at the time, life on the ship. And some of us ended up specializing, too. The ship's surgeon had to learn the medical knowledge of the time period.

They gave us assigned readings from trusted sources. And were were also given latitude to go looking for sources that would be checked out by the science museum, to make sure they were trustworthy. Turns out there's lots of incorrect information out there. People found old trial documents and those would sometimes have different accounts that contradicted one another. David Cordingly wrote a great book about famous pirates. [He means Under the Black Flag. Cordingly is a naval historian—MKB] The exhibit is actually owned by National Geographic, so we had access to supporting info from them, as well.

We would all bring in books, buy a copy and share it around. There was a lot of googling. We'd find just snippets of information. I was trying desperately to find more about my person, Richard Nolan. His early life is a fog and after becoming a priate he vanishes completely. Record keeping was done by hand and the spellings of names change and so you have to verify whether that’s actually the person. There was some stuff I found that I had to leave out. For instance, I do know that my character was captured in 1718 and pardoned—one of the very few official pardons ever issued pirates, only two in that year. Then he went back to testify in trials of other pirates on their behalf. I did find an example of Richard Nolan testifying in a trial, but the spelling was off and I can’t verify that’s him.

All I know is that he retired into normal life. We don’t know what he did professionally. He would just show up at these trials to testify on behalf of other pirates.

BR: There's a long a detailed answer that I give every day, but basically he was in charge of dividing up treasure and administering punishment on the ship. But he also represents the crew on matters of their welfare to the captain. The ships were incredibly democratic. That was really interesting. Everything can be put to a vote except when they’re engaged in battle. That was the only time the captain’s word was law. Even severe punishments could be voted down by the crew. [Richard Nolan] would be the one who would do a flogging if someone was too drunk to man their post or fell asleep at watch. If there was a quarrel on the ship, you can’t fight with arms on the ship, so he’d administer pulling up to a beach somewhere for a duel.

They’d have jury trials with the entire crew if there was a major infraction.

It's weird, but it almost has to work that way. It's the only way it could work. The exhibit leans pretty hard on the brotherhood between sailors. And that’s very evident for sure. For instance, if there were not enough hammocks to go around then everybody slept on the floor. But, then again, if you’re running a ship crewed by 180 outlaws and you start handing out 30 hammocks to 50 men you’re going to have a riot. Democracy was the only way it could work for survival's sake.

BR: There’s that, yeah. In a way, it's a funny microcosm for democracy in general. Here's another example. Sam Bellamy became a captain when he challenged the old captain, Benjamin Hornigold. Bellamy and Nolan were originally on another ship captained by another guy who wouldn’t attack English ships out of patriotism. Bellamy put it to a vote of the crew. Sort of market forces at work. And they voted Bellamy captain. Horingold was allowed to choose, he could rejoin the crew or be sent on his merry way. He ended up leaving, so they parted ways and he went off to a different ship. Edward Teach, who later became Blackbeard, went with him. But originally, Blackbeard and Nolan and Bellamy were all on the same boat.

People have a hard time digesting the democratic nature of piracy. The Whydah was originally a slave ship and pirates would free slaves all the time ... if they could sail. If you were a sailor, you were a sailor. Race didn't matter. Sixty percent of Blackbeard’s crew was black. And they weren't only free, but free and equal. Really, actually equal. If they knew how to sail. If there were slaves on a ship they took, and those slaves didn't know how to sail, the pirates would let them go with the ship and the rest of the crew to continue being slaves.

That's actually another thing. None of us use the term "nitty gritty" anymore. Not since we found out what it means. When you had people packed into a slave ship, they'd just be lying in their own filth for months. Months of this horrible passage. And all of that would build up. When the ship reached port and sold the people, someone had to go down below decks and clean all that out. That was getting down to the nitty gritty. All that waste and puke and everything that would be caked on the floorboards of the ship.

BR: Female pirates were included out of overwhelming demand and curiosity. The two that we have are the two that there's a lot of information about. [Mary Read and Anne Bonny] They were documented so well because they were an anomaly. There weren’t any women on the Whydah.

And there really was the idea that women are bad luck. But the flexibility of those notions is very bizarre. There’s no religion on the ship, but they replace it with really strong superstitions. But the superstitions are strangely flexible. You have accounts of women disguised as men, but there also are accounts of them being found out but being allowed to stay on because they’d proven themselves and once you’re in the crew, you’re in the crew.

Mary Reed joined the army as a man and she lived as a man for large chunks of her life. But they’d sail to other areas of the world that had different expectations of female dress and people would pick her out instantly as a woman because the differences were that clear. So were people ever really fooled really? It’s hard to pin that stuff down. We know they were willing to go along with it in some cases.

BR: Crews came from all over. This is one of those things that would be really divisive. You could have religion if you kept it to yourself. You weren’t forced to renounce it or anything. But there was no practice on the ship. In fact, clergy who were captured were treated very, very poorly. These men operated outside normal institutions and with a disdain for them as well. But, again, the superstition is weird. It was bad luck to have a woman on the ship—but if you do, and she gives birth, that’s good luck. And some of it was practical. Gambling wasn’t allowed either on the ship. That’s a safety issue. There's a practical side to some of these things that seem superstitious.

BR: The Navy is basically jail. Press gangs would press men into service in the Navy. You’d be bullied or threatened, if you're in debt. It was kind of a form of debtor's prison. And you’d come back from a tour in the Navy and then they’d charge you for your food and ammunition, so you could end up actually owing them money. Those were the ships that they couldn’t even bring to port because if they let men off they wouldn’t come back. So they’d anchor a mile out and send in the upper crew to pick up provisions. The lower crew would escape if given half a chance. Pirates could go to port without worry, because the boat is making them rich. They have more money than any honest sailor would make in a lifetime.

You get a vote with the pirates, and you don’t with the Navy, of course. In the Navy, the first mate would carry a starter, which is basically a lead weight wrapped in a cable that they were allowed to beat sailors with. There were regulations about where they were allowed to hit you. But no rules about why. So they’d just beat sailors half to death if you weren’t moving fast enough. You were basically an owned part of the ship. It was a system that gave way to very cruel conditions to work under. A lot of pirates were coming from that, and the articles of the ship [a contract/constitution document that every pirate on a ship had to sign] developed out of men coming from that. Flogging was the worst regular punishment you’d find on the pirate ship. But, even then, crew could vote to give you a pass.

And the pay: If you’re in the Navy, you could end up in debt or with nothing. Ditto for merchant ships, you were working for a couple coins a week. But every time a pirate ship takes another ship, you get an equal share. Merchant ships wouldn’t even put up a fight often. They don’t own the cargo. They have no personal investment. What do they care if the pirates take it?

BR: Obviously it doesn’t appear in any of the ships' articles, but it was sort of a known thing that if you were arrested you were going to say that you were forced into piracy. It didn’t help actually in court. But very few pirates didn’t say it. People went to the gallows saying that they were forced into it. But if you look at the conditions, it just doesn’t stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny. "They forced me at gunpoint to join this ship where I work less, get paid more, and nobody beats me. Oh, no! They made me do it!"

In fact, the carpenter was often the only guy on a captured pirate ship to be pardoned. Carpenters don’t need to resort to piracy to make a lot of money. But pirates need skilled carpenters. So it was actually believable that they’d be forced into working for a pirate ship.

I don’t know why Richard Nolan got pardoned. The anecdote is that he was just that persuasive and charming. There's no factual proof of that though.

BR: We have to speak in the present tense in the exhibit. We are acting like we're pirates from 1717, not modern guys dressed up as pirates. And that gets weird. I get kids poking me, going, "You're not real." Yes. I'm real. "Really?" Really. "Really, really?" Yes. Really. Really. Real.

Sometimes we have to convey the information we know to be wrong now in a way that states that, in character, you think it’s correct. So the latest paper published about scurvy at this time period goes back to saying that it’s caused by eating too many fruits and vegetables. Our surgeon looked at a lot of medical literature from the time and he found several times, multiple instances where people would figure out what was causing survey. But then the information wouldn’t get out there, or some crazy home remedy would come into vogue, and the knowledge would disappear again. But he has to portray somebody who believes incorrect information.

We also get a lot of people who want to show us how much they know and that’s goddam irritating. I had a guy who came in literally stroking his goatee. And he points to a gun in the display case where they say "powder" was loaded in it. And he asks, "Is that black powder or gun powder?" And I knew what he was doing. Those are technically different things and actual gun powder wasn’t widely used outside of China until 18-something. They used black powder on the Whydah. But the beauty of speaking in the present tense of 1717 is that I can say “Oh, you mean the powder we put in our guns. Yes.” And he’s like, "No they’re different things." And I’m like, "No they aren’t. We take that powder and we put it in our guns. It's gun powder." And he’s like, "I see what you’re doing. You're just arguing semantics." But it’s not, really. I'm being in character. And I love arguing with those people.

BR: Not remotely. I get asked the same questions a lot, over and over. I get asked about the food. I get asked where we go to the bathroom. That whole segment of questions. Lots of the audience is kids, of course. I practiced with my kids before the exhibit opened, and given all the things you could possibly want to know—the bathroom was number two on their list.

The awesome stuff is information people don't even know to ask about. We've gotten good at finding ways to lead people to it. Like the great sea turtles. For many years, giant sea turtles defied efforts by Royal Academy in England to subject them to taxonomy. That is because giant sea turtles are delicious. They’d try to get these specimens delivered to them by merchant ships or Navy ships and they would repeatedly end up with an empty shell and reports of how tasty it was. The turtles are great. They don’t eat often. All you had to do was turn them upside down and stack them up on each other. Keep them wet sometimes and you get fresh meat for a whole voyage. Apparently they were kind of fatty and a lot like lobster only gigantic.

And the sailors loved it. Their only other choice is hardtack, which you have to cut in half with a knife and bang the bugs out on the table before you eat, and then you have this captive sea turtle and several months where nobody is getting enough food. Furthering science wasn’t the first thing on their minds. So the Academy would send them out again and they'd come back with the empty shells again, like, "Here's the inedible part. Man, that was delicious. Happy science-ing!"

BR: I've not gotten a chance to try it out in the real world. Navigation, I think I have a fair grip on. I could talk my way through it. Our captain could do it, for sure. He could probably find his heading given the sun and stars. I spend a lot of time talking through how to load and fire a cannon, though, so I probably could do that if I had to. I rest easy knowing that, when the zombies rise up, I’ll know how to fire a cannon and sail a ship. Mostly. We all now know a ridiculous amount about this thing we will never actually do. It's weird.

The Real Pirates exhibit runs through Labor Day at the Science Museum of Minnesota. If you were to ask Richard Nolan, he would have to tell you that the Whydah is headed for Massachusetts after it finishes this layover in Barbados. Luckily, I can tell you that the exhibit will next be in Milwaukee.

Read a 1999 National Geographic story about the Whydah.

Check out Barry Clifford's Whydah page. His museum dedicated to the Whydah is located in Provincetown, Mass.

It does successfully prevent sunburn, but what about the evidence for sunscreen protecting you from skin cancer later in life?

The answer: Nobody is really sure. Last year, I wrote a short piece for BoingBoing that looked at this a little bit. The key point: Cancer takes a long time to happen and we haven't been using sunscreen long enough to have much evidence about it.

But, at Discover's The Crux blog, Emily Elert expands on some of the other problems in play. One of the key things—and something that will hopefully be fixed by this time next year—there's nothing on the sunblock you buy to tell you how protective it is against skin cancer. SPF is all about the burn. So even if some sunscreens do protect against cancer, you don't have a good way to know whether or not you're using one of them.

First of all, the way sunscreen’s effectiveness is measured—its SPF rating—basically only describes its ability to block UVB rays. That’s because UVB is the main cause of sunburn, and a sunscreen’s SPF stands for how long you can stay in the sun without getting a sunburn (a lotion that allows you to spend 40 minutes in the sun rather than the usual 20 before burning, for example, has an SPF of 2).

UVA rays can cause cancer but not sunburn, so they don’t factor into the SPF calculation. That means that if you slather on a high SPF sunscreen that only protects against UVB, you’d still absorb lots of UVA radiation, potentially increasing your long-term cancer risk.

Soon it will be easier to tell which sunscreens include ingredients that block or absorb UVA as well as UVB. According to FDA regulations passed last year, products that pass a “Critical Wavelength” test—meaning that they block wavelengths across the ultraviolet spectrum—will carry the label “Broad Spectrum” alongside the SPF, while sunscreens that don’t pass the test will be forbidden from claiming they have such capabilities. However, those regulations don’t go into effect until December, so for this summer, you’re still stuck with SPF. And, by the way, you probably need to apply twice as much sunscreen as you think to actually get an SPF as strong as that marked on the bottle: manufacturers test their products’ SPF with the assumption that you will slather on obscene amounts. This discrepancy could be contributing to the fact that the NIH, when looking the connection between sunscreen use and skin cancer in large populations, doesn’t see clear evidence that sunscreen is effective in reducing the risk of skin cancer. (It’s worth pointing out, too, that there is a clear genetic component in some skin cancers, so just avoiding sun or using sunscreen regularly are not the only factors that determine whether someone gets it.)

Read the rest of the story at The Crux