The never-ending fight over the perfect boiled egg

An article published today in Science Daily has a semi-rant about science communication through cooking. In the end, the article comes down to how to cook the perfect boiled egg – a subject long argued over various kitchen counters. A new method that ignores cooking time and focuses on temperature is emerging: the 6X°C egg.

While I’m still managing soft-boiling – 4.5 minutes in boiling water seems about right – chefs are moving on to specialized temperatures. Each chef has his own opinion on the exact degree, but cooking an egg somewhere between 60 and 65 °C for several hours (it doesn’t matter exactly) is now thought to produce the ‘best’ boiled egg. A single food scientist, César Vega, is speaking out about the ridiculousness of the idea, calling it “nonsense”. He argues cooking time depends on both time and temperature.

The real question is not of time or temperature, but of who out there cares? Vega, and the author of the aforementioned article, argue that cooking can be used to show scientific principals in a fun and understandable way. Most people cook everyday, meaning most people are engaging in a form of chemistry. (Although in my case, I doubt proficiency in cooking directly translates to proficiency in synthesis.)

So should chemistry and home ec. team up? I think so. From various demos I’ve done, the ones involving edibles are always the most popular, especially with younger age groups. So why not have courses explaining how yeast causes dough to rise or why egg whites can be whipped into stiff peaks? Maybe some chemical research can settle the perfectly boiled egg argument once and for all.

Bare-knuckle boxing in PLOS ONE

A paper published recently in the open-access journal PLOS ONE entitled “Getting a Grip on Memory: Unilateral Hand Clenching Alters Episodic Recall,” which, as hinted at by the pun, is about the supposed tie between making a single fist and remembering an event, has been the center of controversy lately.

The abstract of the paper states:

 It was hypothesized that right hand clenching (left hemisphere activation) pre-encoding, and left hand clenching (right hemisphere activation) pre-recall, would result in superior memory.

And they say their hypothesis was proved to be true. One commenter, however, disagrees—and with a pun of their own in the title: “Fist-clenchingly poor science.” The comment attempts to discuss the inherent flaws, starting by:

There are so many flaws it is difficult to know where to begin, but I’d be hard pressed not to fail this paper if it was presented to me as an undergraduate project report.

The climax of the critique showed the main failing of the report:

..the authors admit [the difference between the control and sample groups] was not significant despite repeating throughout the title, abstract, discussion, and press release…

The critique on the whole is pretty funny and informative, and I admit to always loving a controversy (as long as I’m not directly involved). Science controversies are a real favorite of mine, because each side thinks they know the truth and rarely back down or concede. And then when someone does admit to maybe being slightly incorrect, no one lets them forget it. There’s a surprising amount of ego in a group that’s supposed to be made of dispassionate observers.

A mini-argument has also erupted in the comments on the comment.

Woof, quite a long-winded and rhetorical way to state the hypothesis is weakly supported or even disputed, and sample groups too small and biased. The rest of the “comment” steeped in ego.

To which, someone replied.

Did you veer over from a place where ‘woof’ is vigorous rejoinder- where ad hominem is appreciated, and comments on technical subjects are held to two sentences?

With another sub-commenter, commenting on the harshness of the critique:

My problem isn’t with commentary or criticism of the science itself, it’s with how it is expressed. It’s one thing to say “These results need to be treated with caution because the study was under-powered and the analyses didn’t correct for multiple comparisons”. It’s another to say “This is fist-clenchingly, shockingly poor science that wouldn’t even have been acceptable as an undergraduate project”. One is a factual comment on the science, the other is just an emotion-laden and potentially hurtful attack.

All-in-all it’s a pretty good read. The comments that is, not the actual paper, which is arguably garbage.

The Next Generation (of Science Standards) to Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

As I’m sure many people will point out today and in the coming weeks,the Next Generation Science Standards has been released. The plan sets forth standard teaching practices and subjects for K-12 students, which (unbeknownst to me) was previously unstandardized. Twenty-six states have agreed to follow the plan, including my current state of Georgia, but not my home state Florida. The campaign was carried out entirely by the states with no federal aid—an accomplishment in its own right—and there is no mandate for the other twenty-four states to adopt the lesson plans.

As Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Cheif of Science and a proponent of NGSS, says, ”We must teach out students to do something in science class, not to memorize facts.”

Some conservatives are worried by thought of teaching children about evolution and climate change, especially in Kansas and Texas, but many are excited about the curriculum. Last year, Barbara argill, the Republican chairwoman of Texas’ State Board of Education, said there was a “zero percent chance” of Texas adopting the plan. Other organizations, mostly science-based, are excited for the plan.

“This is revolutionary in many respects,” Michael Wysession, one of the scientists who helped with writing the standards, said. “First of all, it is incredible to have most states in the country adopting a single standard. Having each state do its own thing has been really detrimental to the science and engineering education of this country and this is a tremendous step forward.”

I, personally, am very excited about the new approach for teaching science. I have long thought that current methods weren’t reaching students. Even into college, I thought chemistry was boring because previously I had been given a list of facts and scientist names to memorize and regurgitate on a test. Hopefully, the standards will not only help understanding but boost interest as well. Now if only there were standards set in place for teaching mathematics, we’d regain our position on the forefront of science.

Lab Group Prejudice

I recently came across an article explaining Henri Tajfel, a social psychologist, work on group mentalities. The experimenters divided people into arbitrary groups then let individuals, without any conversation with the group, decide how money would be split among the two groups. Now realize that the groups were completely meaningless, the participants knew this, no actual money was transferred, and individuals couldn’t choose to give money to themselves. Still, participants showed a bias against the members of the other group by rewarding them with less money. The conclusion reached by the researchers was that group mentality was even stronger than we might think.

So is this group mentality true in labs? As a graduate student, you spend a lot of time in the lab, interacting with the same people everyday. Together, you celebrate when something works and you bemoan when something doesn’t. You share stories of being yelled at by the professor and failing certain graduate requirements (which they always let you redo). The bond between people becomes pretty strong—and so does the group mentality.

In fact, right off the bat when meeting new students we specify our lab group—”Hi. I’m Jenna and I’m in the Locklin lab.” Often followed by questioning their group alliance—”What lab are you in?”

Sure, internally the group mentality is important. In such stressful times it is comforting to know there are people who will be there to help and encourage you. But what about externally comparing two groups. Would you expect much bias?

I am in a prime position to answer this question as a go-between for two different worlds of chemistry: experimentalists and theorists. And believe me, I have heard a lot of bullshit from both sides. Experimentalists bash the theorists for not being able to do “real” chemistry, while the theorists bash the experimentalists for being lab monkey goons that don’t understand the fundamentals. Both sides are fiercely resolute in their opinions. But which side is correct? Are theorists incapable? Are experimentalists goons?

The answer is neither, no, and absolutely not. Remember, both of these sets are made up of highly educated individuals seeking post-secondary education. Everyone here is competent. So why such animosity? What causes the inability to recognize that the other group is smart and talented? Is it the group mentality of “we’re better than you”? Do we actually need to compare the two and say one is better? I think not. Comparisons, in my opinion, only invite opposition. In a comparison, something is the best, something is the worst, and something else comes in second. No one wants to see themselves as the worst, and many people have trouble being second—especially when you dedicate your entire life (and sanity) to something.

If the group mentality can’t completely be stopped, which is pretty damn likely considering all of the psychological research which points to an insuppressible group mentality, we can at least stop the comparison. Let’s maintain all the benefits of a close-knit group, without judging ourselves against others. Then, maybe, we can all get along.

Google Search Science

Scholarly information is mostly distributed by a Web-based system (Come on, grad students, when was the last time you read a physical article that was published after 1995?), and with this comes a complete overload of information. Adding to the overload of legitimate articles, many predatory journals have popped up solely to make a buck off of unwitting scientists who are eager to publish. These pseudo-journals claim to be peer-reviewed, so how do naive scientists know which publications to avoid? For that matter, how do we know which articles from established journals to read? The ones with the most citations, you may say, but citations take a while to rack up and the first has to come from somewhere.

Nature has a recent article surmising an upcoming shift in how we, as scientists, find worthwhile papers. Basically, they say it will all come down to a Google-style search engine.

“Its PageRank algorithm weights hyperlinks from authoritative sources more heavily. To find which sources count as authoritative, the same algorithm is applied to each of the source’s inbound links, and so on. This simple recursive algorithm has proved remarkably effective, and requires minimal manual tuning. It simply harnesses the quality judgments already being made by the community, implicit in their decisions to link to other pages. This core approach is also the future for scholarly communication.”

This is a great idea, sure. Instead of three unpaid reviewers and a single editor deciding the legitimacy of a journal article, the whole community decides. And it’s automatic!

But will this leave new PIs ranked far behind the long-running “authoritative” professors? Will successful PIs hold a monopoly over their field as their papers are weighted “more heavily?” Will this make the already aggressive world of academia even more difficult to break into?

And maybe as a secondary concern, will this allow hacking of academic journals? Would clever programmers be able to trick the search engine to display their papers first, accruing the most hits?

The Nature article does discuss some concerns, but, honestly, I can’t think of another way to deal with the never-ending supply of science coming from thousands upon thousands of graduate intuitions in the world. Nevertheless, it’s exciting to see what will happen, for better or for worse, to scientific publishing.

Typical Day in the Lab

Heat for seven days and after the seventh day, rest–or cool to room temperature, however you want to think of it. Who would have thought throwing together atomic material and heating the bejesus out of it (anything over 900 °C qualifies as bejesus) would make something useful. Those organic chemists have it wrong, heating to a measly 60 °C and spending hours working up some messy liquid. My way’s all solids, baby. Heat that sucker up, crack the tube, and reap the rewards.

So when I walked into lab this morning, head held high and ready for results, I was feeling pretty good. My crystals should be ready, and the sealed quartz tube holding them should be cool enough to touch. I’d proudly carry my work down to the glassblower’s room–in the basement; poor guy, never seen a window–and let him slice open the tube he had so carefully crafted the previous week. I wonder how he felt, always having to break his masterpieces. But no time to worry about him, I need those crystals!

The tube furnace is flashing green, telling me it’s done with its work, and I congratulate it by flipping the switch that lets it sleep. That thing sucks so much power that it can’t be plugged into any old wall outlet, it has to be hooked directly into the system–best only to keep it on when necessary. I twist the knob that opens the valve that opens the system to air. A loud hiss escapes, followed by thin tendrils of purple smoke. Smoke’s no good; all of my crystals should be solid by now. Holding my breath and clearing the air with one hand, I slide out the holding tray with the other. The tube is there, as it should be, but it’s in two pieces, as it shouldn’t. The heat worked its way into a crack so small that even the glassblower with his Steampunk magnifying glasses didn’t detect it. The smoke was my material floating away. Eight days of anticipation sucked into the ventilation system, leaving purple stains on the pipes.

I stood for a moment staring at the tube. No explosions, no shattering, just a little clink as the tip of the tube landed on the metal tray. In my daze, I forgot the lab until a gloved hand landed on my shoulder. My own hands balled to fists, and my head whipped around in surprise–I’m more of a fight than a flight kind of guy–until I saw the face of my boss. My outside relaxed, but my inside tensed. I knew it was coming. She grinned, reminding me of my cat with her favorite toy mouse, and asked, ”So, do you have any results?”

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Working for two professors is hard, especially when they have different opinions. I end up being the liaison with the general feeling that both blame me for the other’s resistance  It doesn’t help throwing two more graduate students in the mix, both on the same side and very against the other. Somehow I’m expected to remain politic and get along with everyone, but I’m not sure how to stand up and take a side. I’ve thought about what (to me) is the right option, and I’ve tried to express it in a courteous way, but every time I’m shut down by both sides.

This argument has dragged on for months. One side gave in out of sheer exasperation, and the side that won doesn’t even believe in the project. (Guess which side I took.) I suppose this is a lesson in teamwork that everyone learns eventually, but it’s not a fun one. It’s just wasted effort.