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New Media for New Particles

Chasing the Higgs Boson, by Dennis Overbye. New York Times, 2013. Online exclusively.

Reviewed by Sean Carroll.

Back in December, the New York Times published a remarkable online feature: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. In the words of Veronique Greenwood, who reviewed it here at DTU, readers were treated to

a piece not only grippingly reported but physically gorgeous, laced with soaring animations of the mountain, a looping GIF of the wind over the snow, and haunting audio and video captured by the survivors.

The effort paid off. The feature was seen by about three million people, a full third of whom had not previously visited the NYT website.

Now the discovery of the Higgs boson, the biggest physics story of recent years, has been treated to -- well, not exactly the same treatment, but something gesturing a bit in that direction. The March 5 Science Times was given over to a set of articles by Dennis Overbye and accompanying illustrations, all devoted to the Higgs, the Large Hadron Collider, and the future of particle physics. The stories are richly illustrated, with a number of animations, and the package includes a helpful glossary and guide to further reading. (I have it on good authority that entertaining and enjoyable books about this very topic are readily available in stores.)

The Higgs is an interesting challenge for science journalism, since while the excitement among physicists is palpable, it's proven very difficult for anyone (scientists or writers) to effectively convey what is so all-fired important about this particular particle. We sometimes hear that it "gives mass" to other particles -- somewhat true, but somewhat untrue as well. (It gives mass to elementary quarks and leptons, but most of the mass in your body comes from protons and neutrons, which are composite particles that don't get their mass from the Higgs at all.) It is very rarely explained with any effectiveness how this particle ends up giving mass to others. And I have seen almost no attempts at a popular-level explanation of the question that the whole discussion begs: Why do we need a particle to "give mass" to other particles at all? Why can't they just have mass without any help? (The answer comes down to the particular symmetries of the Standard Model of particle physics, which treat versions of particles with different kinds of spin as very different beasts, preventing the appearance of mass unless something breaks the symmetries. Hey, there's a good reason why you don't hear a lot of people trying to explain this stuff.)

Overbye, I think wisely, doesn't spend much time on yet another half-successful whack at Higgs pedagogy. Rather, he spins the human tale of the scientists who searched for the particle, conveying the sense of excitement by letting the physicists speak for themselves. And he is a master at teasing out the telling anecdotes. When physicist Eilam Gross brings his girlfriend down to the cavern of the ATLAS experiment to ask her to marry him, you get a feeling for the kind of emotional significance their work has for these researchers. (“But believe me, I checked a thousand times with her before to make sure she will say yes," Gross assures us.)

There is no single "Aha!" moment when looking for a particle like the Higgs; the boson itself decays before you can see it, leaving behind debris that could easily be produced in completely different ways. It's the precise amount of debris that matters (what kinds of particles, with what energies). The scientific task relies on accumulating enough data to claim a statistically significant result, so the discovery of a particle like the Higgs necessarily creeps up on you. Overbye recounts the gradually mounting excitment from 2011, when the first hints appeared, to June 2012, when teams were losing sleep in a mad rush to get the most reliable results possible in time for the scheduled July 4 talks.

And after that, the champagne.

The NYT Higgs special isn't distinguished only by length and the depth of its reporting, but by the graphical accompaniments to the story. There's a video, a timeline, and a couple of animations. It's here that the difficult pedagogical tasks are tackled, with mixed success. The reality is that it's not the Higgs particle that is important, it's the Higgs field that pervades all of space and affects the properties of the other particles moving through it. The Higgs boson is a vibration in the Higgs field, just like a photon is a vibration in the electromagnetic field. But we're used to thinking of particles much more than fields. So we reach for analogies, none of them completely successful, and the animations here are no different. They go so far as to tell us that the Higgs field is "made up of Higgs bosons." That's one of those statements that, although there are interpretations of the underlying reality according to which it is strictly true, nevertheless move the general reader further away from correct understanding rather than closer to it.

There are other quibbles one could raise, but I don't want to dwell on them too much. It's a shame that Phil Anderson, the condensed matter physicist who first suggested what we now call the Higgs mechanism, is nowhere mentioned in the piece. Indeed, as important as Peter Higgs himself was to the story, it is an accident of history that it's his name that is attached to the mechanism, and good journalism should work to redress the balance rather than contribute to it.

Overall, though, there is some great reporting here on a truly historic discovery in the history of physics. The Higgs deserves this kind of more-than-the-usual-effort take on a major scientific story. In the age of Twitter and blogs, it's harder and harder for traditional news media to be there first; but they can still use their resources to do it right.

 

According to the New York Times, Sean Carroll is "a cosmologist and well-known blogger." His most recent book is The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.

Word Rising: In Long-Form Journalism, How Long Is Too Long?

Uprising, by Phil McKenna. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Review by Virginia Hughes

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama made several nods to climate change. To reduce America’s dependence on oil — and the carbon emissions that come from burning it — he pushed for a bigger investment in clean sources of energy, like wind, solar and natural gas. “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence,” Obama said. “We need to encourage that.”

Thanks to advances in a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, natural gas production in the U.S. grew by 8 percent in 2011, the sixth consecutive year of growth, leading the International Energy Agency to call this “a golden age of gas.” When burned, natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal does. The Obama administration and some prominent scientists — including Obama’s pick for new energy secretary — say natural gas could be used as a “bridge fuel,” curbing our coal consumption until greener alternatives are ready for primetime.

But what if natural gas isn’t so clean?

That’s the question artfully raised in Uprising, the fourth installment from Matter, an online platform for long-form science journalism. Uprising, like Matter’s earlier stories, presents an engaging narrative with juicy characters doing surprising science at a length of around 6,000 words. Unlike the other Matter stories, though, I’m not sure this one needed more than the 3,000 words of a typical magazine feature.

In Uprising, journalist Phil McKenna tells the story of two unlikely collaborators — Bob Ackley, a big-car-loving libertarian with decades of experience as a gas company technician, and Nathan Phillips, a liberal tree-hugging professor — and their wacky adventures cruising the streets of Boston to map natural gas leaks.

When methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere (rather than being burned) it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But nobody knows exactly how much gas is leaking. That’s where Ackley and Phillips come in.

Uprising tells why Ackley and Phillips started to work together, and what they’ve discovered so far: In a paper published last month in Environmental Pollution, they reported finding 3,356 leaks in Boston, including six where gas levels were high enough to cause an explosion. Their study included a city map tracking the leaks, which Matter recreated as a striking black-and-white grid with swashes of red and yellow to indicate the leaks. (And although the study is behind a pay wall, Matter made it somewhat open-access by linking to a Google Doc of the study’s full data set.)

The problem, for me, is that it’s unclear how (or whether) this single study contributes to the greater international debate about natural gas and climate that McKenna did such a great job setting up. The study focused on the number of leaks, rather than their volume, so it can’t say anything definitive about whether natural gas really is worse for the climate than coal.

It’s not that these investigations don’t matter: We learn that Ackley and others are finding similarly frightening numbers of leaks in other cities, such as Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and that some of this data is driving a major lawsuit against a utility company. It’s entirely plausible that these leaks will put a crimp on the natural gas boom. But the story doesn’t say much about how the wider energy community has reacted to this data. It didn’t include any skeptical voices, or any comments from scientists or policy makers who still believe in natural gas as a bridge fuel.

I was expecting the story to answer the initial question posed: What if natural gas isn’t so clean? And when I didn’t get that answer, I was disappointed, in a way that I might not have been had the story been shorter. The view, for me, wasn’t quite worth the climb.

 

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

A Few Pounds of Microbes, Only Ounces of Insight

Honor Thy Symbionts, by Jeff Leach. Kindle

Guest review by Kevin Bonham

In 2003, the Human Genome Project--an effort to sequence every gene in a human being--was completed. The success, announced to great fanfare, was supposed to herald a new era in health care. Unfortunately, the promises of personalized medicine, in which treatments are tied to a person's genetic sequence, have not yet come to fruition. A few of the reasons for this are obvious (at least in hindsight). Knowing the location and sequence of a gene is one thing, knowing what it does is quite another. And understanding the role that a gene or gene variant plays in a disease, especially when many afflictions are influenced by tens or hundreds of genes, is even harder.

Complicating matters further is the re-emerging realization that genes are not destiny, and now many new "-omics" projects are beginning to gain attention. From the transcriptome (what genes are actually expressed), to the proteome (proteins and protein modification), to the epigenome (modifications of the DNA that regulate gene expression), more and more researchers are attempting large-scale analysis of entire biological systems and trying to extract meaningful information from enormous data sets. In his new ebook, Honor Thy Symbionts, Jeff Leach aims to tackle what is, in my opinion, the most fascinating of these new -omics revolutions: The Human Microbiome Project.

I desperately wanted to like Leach's book. Even though I've repeatedly heard the refrains, "There are 10 times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells," and "There are 100 times more bacterial genes in your gut than there are human genes," and "Bacteria account for 5 to 10 percent of your body mass," these facts never cease to amaze me. And I've been to enough microbiome-related research talks to know that the microscopic bugs that live in our guts can have profound impacts on our health--from metabolic disorders and type-II diabetes to multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. The microbiome deserves a book-length discussion, but Honor Thy Symbionts falls short.

Problems

Problem 1 (I think this is the underlying reason for all of this book's problems): It's not a book, it's a collection of "essays" that are really just blog posts.

In fact, you can go to Leach's website and read almost all of the "chapters" for free on his blog. As I read his alleged book on my Kindle, it was abundantly clear that Leach simply did a large-scale copy-paste, without much additional effort. Spelling and grammatical errors abound, and phrases like "In a series of blog posts starting with this one[...]" only serve to call attention to the fact that I paid three dollars to download something I could just as easily have read on the Internet for free. In one chapter, the text refers to a graph that apparently didn't make it in the migration to Kindle. And since each chapter is really just a blog post, there's no cohesive narrative to tie the book together. Even the unifying "theme" of the microbiome is misleading, since several of the chapters don't even mention microbes.

 

Problem 2: A lot of the science is overstated.

Throughout this book, I had the same feeling of professional scientific unease I get when reading Malcolm Gladwell, without the benefit of Gladwell's ability to spin a narrative. For instance: 

Though improved hygiene has many benefits, scrubbing soil from our bodies and food has thrown our immune system into an over reactive tailspin and is responsible for the skyrocketing increase in allergies and autoimmune disease.

There are several lines of evidence suggesting that hygiene may increase the risk for many inflammatory disorders, but there are plenty of other factors that may play a role, and a marginal increase in risk is a far cry from an "over reactive tailspin."

In another case, Leach describes compelling research suggesting that fiber intake can alter the levels of certain types of microbes. But then he leaps to a prescription how many grams of fiber we should eat each day (an amount significantly higher than current nutritional guidelines).

And in yet another case, Leach spends several pages discussing research on the protein consumption of spider monkeys. Based on this study, he draws conclusions about everything from human diets to agribusiness, sociology and the economics of poverty and health, finally concluding the chapter by pointing out that

This all assumes, of course, that the protein leverage theory plays any role in all of this. Maybe it doesn’t.

At least he admits the ambiguity this time. But then why all the self-assured conclusions? At times I wanted to pull my hair out.

Further complicating this scientific over-reach is Leach's failure to cite the research he's referring to. There's an extensive collection of references at the back of the book, but no link within the text to the reference itself. This seems to be another symptom of copy-pasting from a blog post. The blog posts have web links, but they were apparently were stripped out when the conversion was made.

Problem 3:  Inconsistency of style and complexity.

Leach jumps back and forth from lofty rhetoric:

It is at this interface between the terra firma of our evolutionary past and the enhanced material standard of living[...]

to colloquialisms that border on inanity. Sometimes he makes the jump within a single sentence: 

In just a few thousand centuries, our kind has gone from nesting in trees, to making stone tools and digging roots, to kindling fires, to subduing flora and fauna, to erecting massive cities, and finally to downloading Angry Birds over 1 billion times (and counting).

Leach routinely throws in random and unnecessary digs at creationists. At one he point calls health-care workers who recommend baby formula "predatory." I found the constant movement between grandiosity and link-bait trolling to be jarring. 

Leach also routinely mixes lay-accessible and jargon-laden writing. I know what 16S ribosomal RNA and shotgun pyrosequencing (misspelled as prosequencing) are, but I doubt the target audience of this book will. In some cases, the jargon is useful and adequately explained, but in others it just seems like Leach is trying to show off.

Redeeming Qualities

Despite these glaring problems, I don't think Leach should be written off entirely. A lot of the science he talks about is interesting and important. Our obsession with cleanliness probably does play some role in the increased prevalence of allergies and autoimmunity, even if it's not the only cause. People probably should be eating more fiber, even if we can't make a specific grams/day recommendation. The cheap cost of corn and expense of protein probably explains at least a portion of the paradoxical association of poverty and obesity, even if we can't draw a straight line between spider monkey diets and our own. And the main thesis of this book, that our dietary decisions need to be increasingly informed by our emerging understanding microbiome, is almost certainly correct.

Strangely, Leach himself makes much the same point in the introduction to this book.

While researchers are cautious and right not to oversell the microbiome (much work is still needed to confirm causation for many ailments), the direct or indirect implication of microbes in a staggering number of ailments and diseases of the modern world, reinforces that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift from the orthodox notions of health and disease.

It's a shame that the author failed to exercise some of that caution himself.

Final Verdict

 There are too many problems for me to recommend this book. Prepare an enormous grain of salt and head over to Leach's blog instead. You'll get most of the same material, including web links to the relevant research so you can fact check any claims that seem overwrought. Meanwhile, I will anxiously await a book that tackles the microbiome and does justice to this amazing new field of research.

 

Kevin Bonham is a graduate student studying the immune system at Harvard University. He blogs about microbes and the immune system at We, Beasties on the Scienceblogs network.

A Year of Downloading the Universe

By Carl Zimmer

It's now been a year since we started exploring science ebooks here at Download the Universe. By the time we got the site off the ground, people had already started producing some digital gems. The first work reviewed at Download the Universe, The Elements, brilliantly dismantled the ingredients of a book and rearranged them to take advantage of the touch-sensitive iPad. In 2011 science writer Laurie Garrett had taken the leap to Kindle in order to write I Heard the Sirens Scream, a harrowing account of how the United States responded to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks.

Yet we were also dismayed to discover find a lot of wasted opportunities. David Dobbs delivered the first unbridled attack on a stinker, a silly pamphlet called Smile that promised that grinning will solve just about anything. Likewise, I reeled at The Demise of Guys, an incoherent ebook by a prominent psychologist convinced that men were lost to porn and online games.

Both of these books were published by TED, based on talks that they had hosted. While there's a lot of good stuff to be watched on TED, there are a fair number of talks that pretend to be based on solid science when, in fact, their foundation is a thin, cracking skin of ice. Smile and The Demise of Guys didn't seem to be carefully vetted by an editor who would push back against poppycock. Both ebooks felt as if they had been simply waved through like cars in a line of traffic. In fairness, we did give positive reviews to some other TED Books--Controlling Cancer, What's Killing Us, Living Architecture to name three. But that unevenness makes us wonder if the quality of ebooks depends on the author and the author alone.

Absentee editing was not unique to TED. Meandering Mississippi was based on a series of newspaper articles--by which I mean they were little more than cut and paste into a new format. An ebook about dinosaurs was little more than a digitized cable documentary. An ebook about the Titanic somehow managed to lack any passion.

It would be a shame if ebooks became nothing more than hastily assembled spin-offs of print books, documentaries, or lectures. Fortunately, as this past year progressed, we had lots of good reasons to keep our hope for ebooks alive. New ebooks turned up that exceeded our expectations, or simply popped up far off the grid, beyond our preconceived map of what ebooks could be. I still enjoy turning the pages of Leonardo's anatomical notebooks, intercalated with insights from modern anatomists. For some of the best ebooks the term "ebook" barely even functioned. Snowfall was a ravishing account of a deadly avalanche hosted by the New York Times web site. Ironically, when it was turned into a more conventional ebook (if ebooks are mature enough now to even be conventional), it became a far less satisfying experience.

This past year also offered hope in the form of new publishing outfits dedicated to ebooks, many of which were about science. They were few in number and small in size, but they typically showed a level of care and creativity that much bigger publishing companies lacked. Symbolia offers comics science journalism. Byliner and Matter produced some excellent pieces of "in-between" science writing--too long for a magazine article, too short for a book.

Top honors go to the Atavist, a Brooklyn publishing house that produced an impressive string of pieces over the past year, on subjects ranging from moon rocks to brain-controlled robots to the mysteries of consciousness to a hunt for tree kangaroos. While readers can buy a stripped-down Kindle version, they can also buy an edition with elegantly incorporated maps, audio recordings, and other features.

Like many other journalists and scientists, we also dipped our collective toe into the ebook waters. David Dobbs joined Download the Universe having already written the best-selling My Mother's Lover. Deborah Blum published an absorbing account of a sensational murder trial called Angel Killer. I helped build an app to accompany a textbook about evolution I co-authored. Seth Mnookin edited a Matter ebook about regenerating organs.

I expect we will delve deeper in the year to come, both as writers and as reviewers. Over the past year, we've published over 80 reviews and essays, and we've got a healthy inventory of titles we're looking forward to writing about in the months to come. The ebook business is continuing to grow, but it's still hard to find out about new science titles. We plan to keep making it a little easier.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

The Elusive Psychology of Mass Murder

The Mind of a Madman: Norway's Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik. By Richard Orange. Kindle Single, $1.99.

Review by Maia Szalavitz

Following Aurora and Sandy Hook— and the concerns that have not surprisingly arisen over the questions of violence, guns and mental illness— I was eager to read journalist Richard Orange’s Mind of a Madman: Norway’s Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik .

The book ably and lucidly details the story of the trial of the man who carried out the world’s deadliest mass shooting by a single individual. It’s full of twists and turns, with Orange expertly doling out the suspense as to whether the killer will ultimately be declared sane or not. But it lacks the context and analysis I’d hoped to find in an account of an event in which psychiatry faces off against what can only be called evil.

Orange, a foreign correspondent for the UK’s Daily Telegraph, covered Breivik’s trial after the Norwegian right wing ideologue killed 8 people in bomb attacks on government buildings in Oslo, then gunned down 69 people, mostly teens, who were attending a political youth camp in July 2011.

Breivik claimed he committed the attacks to “save” Norway from Islam, multiculturalism, “cultural Marxism” and feminism. Initially, a psychiatric report by two of the country’s leading experts claimed that he had paranoid schizophrenia.

Their evidence for this diagnosis was his apparently false claims about being connected to a larger terrorist network, his self-bestowed medals and handmade military “uniform” and his belief that he had the right to kill for his ideas. These were seen as “delusions,” which occurred after a period of social withdrawal before the attacks and his rants were said to contain “neologisms” or made-up words, additional evidence of disordered thinking.

According to the initial report, these factors were apparently enough to qualify Breivik for a diagnosis of schizophrenia under the ICD 10, which is the international medical diagnostic manual and is similar in its psychiatric classifications to the DSM.

“His political world exists just to have a world to be psychotic in,” one of authors of the report testified.

But after the report was leaked, experts on the far right argued that Breivik’s “neologisms” were actually common terms used by others with similar views, making the diagnosis controversial. The ICD criteria apparently require that schizophrenic beliefs be “culturally inappropriate,” and the fact that the other far right groups he saw as his peers had similar views called that into question.

Breivik was surprisingly insightful about this paradox: “What I think is that [they] could not believe that a normal person could do such a thing. A person who does something so terrible cannot be normal. He must be sick.”

After widespread outrage, a second report was ordered. This time, a new group of professionals determined that Breivik had not been psychotic while carrying out the attacks. The second report accepted that his ideology and resulting actions, while clearly despicable, were not in and of themselves evidence of psychosis.

But there was still disagreement among the experts who testified as to what Breivik’s diagnosis— and everyone agreed that there should be one— actually was. Breivik had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder as a child because of his “pedantic” ways and obsessive compulsive behavior, so one psychiatrist suggested that this led to his “lack of empathy.”

However, a psychologist disagreed with the accuracy of that diagnosis, testifying that during an evaluation, Breivik was “polite and friendly and seemed empathetic.” One of Brievik’s childhood friends had called him “one of the most sociable people” that he knew.

Other psychiatrists argued that Brievik’s real problem was a personality disorder— either narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, probably well into psychopathy— or some toxic combination of the two, along with his racist ideology.

Mind of a Madman, however, does not provide readers enough context to draw conclusions about Breivik's true state of mind. It does not include the ICD diagnostic criteria or give any background information about conditions like personality disorders, schizophrenia and Asperger’s. As a result, it’s very difficult to weigh the battling reports and conflicting testimony. The book doesn’t mention that autism spectrum disorders are not linked with violence, nor does it explore the controversy over the link between schizophrenia and violence. It also fails to examine the question of empathy itself. This quality is critical to several of the diagnoses and seems to have been misunderstood by some of those who testified, incorrectly claiming that autistic people always lack empathy.

While this probably reflects a newspaper journalist’s attempt to be “objective” and simply detail the (most certainly compelling) story of the trial, it left me frustrated. Underneath this story is a tale of the ongoing problems with our current system of psychiatric diagnosis and the lack of objective measures available to characterize mental illness. There’s also a story about why some diagnoses— like schizophrenia— are seen as mitigating, while others— like personality disorders— are seen as aggravating. And of what brain science suggests about moral responsibility.

Moreover, there’s also an untold story of a country which is not bent on vengeance even after such an unimaginable crime, a country that would have accepted either an insanity verdict or the one that came down, which found Breivik morally responsible and sentenced him to 21 years, a sentence that can and likely will be extended if he is still found dangerous at that time.

Of course, a short ebook may not be the place for such depth, but some basic facts about diagnosis and the controversies it evokes would have been extremely useful. There’s certainly room for greater exploration of the Breivik case in light of these distressingly frequent events— and especially for an examination of the role of culture, psychiatric ideas and varying legal systems so that we can become better at preventing or dealing with them.

 

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and the author of five books, most recently Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered, with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D.

"Buckeye tigers," a midnight massacre, and missed opportunities

Rough Beasts: The Zanesville Zoo Massacre, One Year Later, by Charles Siebert. Published by Byliner. $2.99. Available on Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Byliner.com.

By Seth Mnookin

On October 18, 2011, a 62-year-old, recently released convict named Terry Thompson freed eighteen tigers, seventeen lions, six black bears, and fifteen other "exotic animals" from a jumble of cages and pens on his 73-acre farm in Zanesville, Ohio. What happened next is not exactly clear, but it appears that Thompson pulled down his pants, smeared his crotch with chicken blood and viscera, and shot himself in the mouth with a .357 magnum. By the time authorities were able to recover his body, Thompson's genitalia had been eaten away; one or more of the animals had also gnawed on Thompson's head.

That those are some of the least remarkable details from the events that transpired that rainy October night should tell you something about the ensuing insanity. The first hint that something was wrong came around 5pm, when a neighbor named Sam Kopchak noticed a bear chasing some of Thompson's horses through a field; seconds later, Kopchak realized he was several feet away from a male African lion, who watched intently as Kopchak anxiously led one of his own horses to safety. By that point, there was barely an hour of daylight left before sunset -- and Thompson's farm was within a few miles of a nursing home, a gas station, a motel, and, most ominously, a school, which, at the time, happened to be hosting a children's soccer game on a playing field surrounded by woods. 

Great Investigations Deserve Great Ebooks

In The Wrong Hands, by Ryan Gabrielson, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting. $.99, Kindle Single.

 by Deborah Blum

For well over a year, the investigative reporters at California Watch (part of the non-profit center for Investigative Reporting) have been pursuing a story involving abuse of mentally ill patients in state care -  and of institutional indifference to that abuse.

That investigation, led by Ryan Gabrielson, focused on five state operated centers that house "some of society's most vulnerable citizens - men and women with severe autism, cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities living in taxpayer funded institutions." To sum up the results, it found that center residents had been beaten, tortured and raped by staff members. And that a police force, set up to protect resident safety, had apparently helpfully looked the other way.

The stories, first detailed in a series called Broken Shield, are best described as horrifying, a litany that includes the taser burning of a dozen patients, the rape of others, and the death of a quadriplegic patient with cerebral palsy, who died of internal bleeding after three cotton-tipped swabs tore through his esophagus. None of these incidents, as the investigation makes clear, were thoroughly evaluated by the well-paid police force assigned to those centers. In many cases, including the worst ones, no charges were filed.

There's another interesting issue here--the platforms which California Watch used to tell this story--but I'd rather start by considering its importance, its indictment of the way we care for helpless and troubled people, in particular the system in California. And to acknowledge that I'm not alone in this reaction. Everyone from newspaper readers to state officials was appalled. The stories prompted major reorganizations of centers, investigations by outside experts, and new legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, mandating far stricter law enforcement oversight. This month, the state agreed not to seek Medicare reimbursement for care at the most troubled centers. This is a story that matters, one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up here.

These powerful changes are foremost a result of really powerful reporting. But California Watch also amplified that effect by making sure that its findings were heard across multiple platforms. The stories were placed on its website. They were distributed to newspapers across the state, running in all eight of the state's largest newspapers. They were showcased on radio programs, partly through the center's partnership with KQED. Videos were provided to television stations. California Watch even produced a graphic-novel style video, which illustrated the trauma suffered by patients and their families.

And in December, the Center for Investigative Reporting published the series as a 99-cent Kindle single titled In the Wrong Hands: How a Police Force Failed California's Most Vulnerable Citizens. In one sense, the single is perhaps the least impressive part of this approach. It's a workmanlike summary of the original series rather than a uniquely good e-publication in its own right. The story-telling remains in a basic newspaper format;  there's a puzzling lack of illustration, audio, video or really anything would bring additional life to the telling.

This is less of a problem in a gorgeous narrative or exceptionally fun-to-read story. But this is neither of those things. In the Wrong Hands reads like what it is --a repackaged newspaper series rather than a well-articulated book. It's dense enough and dark enough to occasionally be a challenge to read--exactly the kind of story that benefits from other kinds of media--perhaps even some of California Watch's own novelistic video. I suspect that with a little more time and care, this could have been  a more substantial and more meaningful e-single, one that would have reached  an even wider audience (when I checked on January 21, its Kindle single standing was 364,414).

I respect--and even admire--the California Watch model for distributing news and for solvency in a digital age (briefly outlined here at the Nieman Journalism Lab). But as someone who also has hopes for the e-publishing age that we are growing into, I'd like to argue for setting a high professional standard for e-books, both short and long, one that really moves them beyond old-time print. If we're building a new model of story telling then there's nothing wrong wanting it to be a really good one.

And, after all, a great investigation--which In the Wrong Hands was--deserves a great platform.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, published her first e-single, Angel Killer, last year. She writes for numerous publications, blogs about chemistry at Wired, and teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Flatland: Rediscovering A Multidimensional Classic

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott. Originally published in 1884. Free. Google Play. Project Gutenberg (numerous formats).

Guest review by Jaime Green

When I was about twelve years old, I saw the shadow of a four-dimensional cube. It was in a special exhibit at the New York Hall of Science on geometry and topology, the math of surfaces and shapes. And for some reason, it's stuck with me. A three-dimensional model built of angles and lines, square and trapezoids, like a metastasized cube. It was hung in mid-air, just above my tween eye level.

I can't quite picture the three-dimensional shadow now. So many years have passed. It's also the sort of thing that hovers just beyond your understanding, so it's fitting that the memory flits out of reach, too. Much of trying to understand advanced math can be like that. You understand the analogy, or you can read the equation, but you can't really picture the concept. You know it's there. Maybe if you sit very still, maybe if you hold your breath, something will flash into your mind. Imagine a four-dimensional sphere. Just try.

The best pleasures of Edwin A. Abbott's classic book, Flatland, are the moments in which Abbott draws you a little closer to that flash of insight, impossible as, for a layperson, it may be. Through analogy and explanation, Abbott makes you feel like you are a hair's breadth away from understanding, from being able to see in four dimensions. It's a book about math and yet, even despite its short length, it's much more.

Darwin In the Age of Ebooks

The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits , by Charles Darwin. (Free: available on iBooks and Kindle)

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes (guest reviewer)

Charles Darwin wrote many books and many types of books, the most famous of which you can download for free on iBooks or Kindle . How to choose?

If you want a really good story, go with Voyage of the Beagle, the charming journal Darwin kept while working as a naturalist on a ship that went from England to South America, Tahiti, Australia, the tip of Africa and back. The first sentence is enough to pull you in:

The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect.

If you’re looking for scientific import, nothing beats Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that outlined his theory of natural selection and would forever change biology. You might also try The Descent of Man for provocative ideas about race, gender, and sex, or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals for its lively photographs of faces that would inspire a future science of lie-detection.

It’s hard to think of a reason to read Darwin’s last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, unless you’re curious about exactly those things. But for all you vermiphiles, there’s probably no better format for this volume than an e-book.

Darwin began thinking about worms in October of 1837, a year after disembarking the Beagle, when his uncle Josiah told him a curious story. Three years before, Jos had spread a layer of cinders on a field near his home in the English countryside. Since then the cinders had sunk several inches and been replaced with a layer of fine and uniform particles of soil known as vegetable mould. Could it be the work of the worms?

Intrigued, Darwin spent a few weeks closely observing his uncle’s fields. Sure enough, he discovered that the grass was littered with tiny cylindrical castings of worms. The next month, he formally presented his uncle’s idea to the Proceedings of the Geological Society of London: The digestive process of earthworms, en masse, is responsible for creating the vegetable mould that helps crops grow. In this way, Darwin said, the lowly worm is a “geological power.”

That short paper planted a seed for a more substantial book about worms but, because of his many other writing projects, Darwin didn’t get around to finishing it for 44 years. The book isn’t terribly long—some 222 pages on my iPad—but after reading a few pages I thought it might take 44 years to finish.

For better or for worse, the first two chapters—Habits of Worms and Habits of Worms Continued—feel like a transcription of Darwin’s laboratory notebook. Some of his experiments are fun to read about, like when he exposed his potted household worms to the noise of a metal whistle, a bassoon, piano banging, and shouting, all to prove that the critters were deaf. Other observations are not so fun, like the 23 pages describing which end of a leaf a worm pulls into its burrow (for English plants: 80 percent were tugged from the tip, 9 percent from the base, and 11 percent from the middle). Even in the tedious sections, though, the narration has a satisfying intellectual payoff. For example, Darwin uses the worm’s leaf-pulling methods—which are neither random nor instinctual—to argue that the animals have some level of intelligence.

After 86 pages of worm habits, Darwin finally gets into the meat of the theory, describing in detail the soil observations that he made at his uncle’s house and in the decades since. The next chapters are more historical and thoughtful, asking how worms may have played a part in the “burial of ancient buildings” and the “denudation of the land.” It may have been no coincidence that Darwin chose decomposition as his final scholarly subject. By that time he was old, sick and beginning to talk a lot about his own death. He died in April 1882, six months after Worms was published.

While slogging through the book, I kept wondering how it could have been so popular, selling thousands of copies within weeks. Not only that, but Darwin apparently received a lot of fan mail. Readers sent him all sorts of their own stories and questions about earthworms.

Perhaps, rather than a well-paced narrative meant to be read cover to cover, Worms was bought as a handy reference book. Back then, after all, if you saw a strangely shaped worm mound in your backyard garden, you couldn’t do a Google image search to diagnose it.

Thinking of it that way, maybe Worms was a proto-Wikipedia. Darwin constantly references the worm writings of other naturalists, just like Wikipedia’s numerous footnoted citations. Each chapter begins with a paragraph of disjointed clauses that outlines the ideas within, just like the hyperlinked contents box at the top of every Wikipedia page. And you can read the book’s chapters in practically any order—easy as scrolling down a browser window.

Actually, reading Worms the e-book is arguably better than reading about worms on Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, I could bookmark multiple pages, highlight passages and write notes in the margins. Best of all, I was never left wondering about the validity of the source material: This is the authoritative voice of one of the greatest biologists of all time.

So if you’re into worms, by all means download Worms and crawl into its deep, sleepy passages. If you’re not into worms, just read the Wikipedia summary.

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist and Popular Science, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Fear and More Fear in Central America: An Ebook Look at John McAfee

John McAfee's Last Stand by Joshua Davis. Published by Conde Nast. Kindle, $0.99, or as part of Wired's Nook ($4.99) and iPad ($3.99) editions of the Jan 2013 issue.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

When the Belizean government announced on November 12 of last year that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning about the murder of his neighbor on the white-sand island of Ambergris Caye, it was just the latest, grimmest installment in one of the strangest tech stories of 2012. The former anti-virus tycoon's Central American escapades had become news six months prior, when his jungle compound had been raided by the government on suspicions that he was manufacturing meth.

No drugs were found, but after the raid, Joshua Davis, a Wired contributing editor, began investigating McAfee's doings, spending time with the gun-spangled man himself and his array of young female companions. When McAfee went on the lam after the murder, saying he'd be killed if he turned himself in, Wired published Davis' profile as a 47-page ebook, John McAfee's Last Stand. It paints a picture of a fascinating paranoiac whose fear brought him to the top of the anti-virus industry and to the bottom of a hole dug in the sand where he hid, covered by a piece of cardboard, while officials searched for him after the death of Gregory Faull. It's an engaging read, even now that further chapters, including an escape to Guatemala, an accidental disclosure of his location by Vice magazine, and expulsion to Florida, have been added to McAfee's story.