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Rejoicing In Ants With A Citizen Science Ebook

Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants. Text by Eleanor Spicer Rice. Photographs by Alex Wild. Available at The School of Ants. iPad or pdf. Free.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Many plants grow a thick coat around their seeds. The coat, called an elaiosome, doesn't do the seed any good, at least directly. Its immediate job is to attract an insect known as the winnow ant. (The photo here shows winnow ants discovering blood root seeds.) The eliaosome releases fragrant odors that lure the ants, which carry the seed into their nest. There they gnaw away at the coating but spare the seed. The ants then carry the shucked seedback out to the forest floor, where it germinates.

The winnow ants thus act like gardeners, protecting the seeds from predators that would destroy the seeds, while also spreading them far from their parent plant. Remove winnow ants from a forest, and its populations of wildflowers will shrink.

As a resident of the northeastern United States, I always assume that all the magnificent examples of coevolution must be going on somewhere else. The jungles of Ecuador, the Mountains of the Moon--these are the places where nature-film producers go to find species exquisitely adapted to each other. This, of course, just belies my far-less-than-complete education in natural history. While reading Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants, I discovered that winnow ants are abundant in New England, along with the rest of the eastern United States. The next time I am out on a walk in the local woods, I'm going to keep an eye out for these elegant little insects.

Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants is itself an elegant little book--and an instructive example of how ebooks can become a tool in the growing citizen science movement. "Citizen science" typically refers to research that relies not just on a handful of Ph.D. researchers, but also on a large-scale network of members of the public. Birders have been doing citizen science for over a century, and now the Internet enables people to collaborate on many other projects, from mapping neurons in the eye to folding proteins to recognizing galaxies. Many of these projects yield solid scientific results (see this paper in Nature, with over 57,000 co-authors as an example). They also provide a new way for research to draw non-scientists into their world.

A Portable Science Museum

Sound Uncovered by The Exploratorium. iPad (iOS6 required), Free.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi. 

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. 

Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music. It's part of a series that also includes Color Uncovered. 

The app is basically a portable Exploratorium. It would be very simple to convert everything in here (from games to text) into a meatspace exhibit. And that's a good thing. There are some big benefits to having access to your own, private museum. A) You get to press the buttons as many times as you want. B) You actually have the time and the headspace necessary to explore the text and learn the things the button-pressing is supposed to teach you. 

For instance, one module features a psuedo vintage tape deck that allows you to record yourself speaking, and then play the recording both normally, and in reverse. You're particularly encouraged to try recording palindromes—words and phrases that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. You might think that palindromes would also sound the same backwards and forwards, but you'd be wrong. The phrase "too bad I hid a boot", for instance, sounds more like garbled Japanese when it's played backwards. 

Having this all to yourself on an iPad means that you can spend a lot of time being silly (examples of recordings made by this reviewer include palindromes in different accents, "Hail Satan", and multiple swear words) while easily jumping back and forth between the interactive diversion and the explanations of how it works and how it fits into modern society. I can even imagine kids playing with the toy part of this for a while before finally stumbling upon the embedded text and having their games suddenly illuminated with meaning. That's pretty cool. In a museum setting, I've watched plenty of kids muck around with the button pressing and then run off before they ever have a chance to learn that phonemes are distinct units of sound or that backward speech doesn't just reverse the order of the phonemes, but reverses the phonemes themselves. Sound doesn't have palindromes. 

The other benefit here is that Sound Uncovered eliminates the need for the role of Boring Adult — the person charged with the futile task of reading the explanatory text out loud to a gaggle of button-pressing children who really do not care about that right now. In doing so, it frees adults to actually have fun and learn something, too. If you don't have to be the education enforcer, and can trust that your kids will discover the explanations as they play with the app over time, then you're able to actually engage in play yourself —both with your kids and without them. The portable museum is a place for kids, and it's a place for adults, too. 

That said, I think an adult on their own would probably burn through this pretty quickly. I got most of what I'm going to get out of it on a three-hour plane flight. But it's also free, so it's not like you're out a lot of money for a small amount of information. In general, I'd say Sound Uncovered is a good example of how the digital format can be used to improve science communication in ways that aren't easily possible in the real world.

 

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net, the science columnist at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of  Before the Lights Go Out.

Monet's Ultraviolet Eye

Color Uncovered. Produced by the Exploratorium. Ipad. Free

Reviwed by Carl Zimmer

Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he perceived grew muddy. Monet's cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see--and to paint--in ultraviolet.

We can turn light into vision thanks to the pigments in our eyes, which snatch photons and trigger electric signals that travel to our brains. We have three types of pigments tuned to violet, green, and red light. Birds, bees, and many other animals have additional pigments tuned to ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet vision has led to the evolution of ultraviolet color patterns. In some butterfly species, for example, the males and females look identical to the ordinary human eye. In UV light, however, the males sport bright patterns on their wings to attract the females. Many flowers have ultraviolet colors, often using them to get the attention of pollinating bees.

While each kind of pigment responds most strongly to a particular color, it can also respond more weakly to neighboring parts of the spectrum. The violet-tuned pigment, for example,can respond wealy to ultraviolet light, which has a higher frequency. Most of us don't get to experience that response, because our lenses filter out UV rays.

But Monet did. With his lens removed, Monet continued to paint. Flowers remained one of his favorite subjects. Only now the flowers were different. When most people look at water lily flowers, they appear white. After his cataract surgery, Monet's blue-tuned pigments could grab some of the UV light bouncing off of the petals. He started to paint the flowers a whitish-blue.

I just learned about Monet's super-vision while reading the lovely Color Uncovered, produced recently for the iPad by the Exploratorium of San Francisco, one of the best science museums on Earth. I don't quite know what to call Color Uncovered. Its iTunes page describes it as "an interactive book that features fascinating illusions, articles, and videos." Yet it feels like an elegantly designed museum exhibit poured into an iPad. Making matters more confusing, you have to go to the education category of the app store in iTunes to find it. When it comes to describing what it is we review here at Download the Universe, words often fail us. Sometimes that's a bad thing, because we're reviewing muddled products of muddled minds. In other cases--like this one--it just means that someone is making good use of several different genres, and melding them into something for which there's no good label.

Look Up In The Sky! It's A Book! It's An App! It's a Bat!

Bats! Furry Fliers of the Night. 2012. by Mary Kay Carson. Published by Bookerella. iPad. Publisher's page

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

 

Yesterday my daughters--Charlotte, 10, and Veronica, 8--were playing some inscrutable game involving two beach balls and running in and out of the house. As they roared through my office, I called out.

"Veronica," I said. "Do you want to read something?"

She stopped. "What?" she asked. There was no eagerness in her voice.

Veronica is always a bit suspicious when I ask her this question, which I often do. She doesn't like to have good-for-you things foisted on her. But she also knows that from time to time, I may have something for her that's actually worth reading. Something involving Egyptian mummies, usually, or the sinking of the Titanic.

"I want to find out what you think about this. It's a book you read on an iPad."

Veronica looked at my iPad as I flipped open the cover and switch on the power.

"Is it a book or an app?" she asked.

Good Lord, I thought. When did this kid become a new media maven?

Just a couple days earlier, I had been reading an interesting article by Adam Penenberg in Fast Company that raised this question. Honestly--the first line of the article is, "When is a book an app and an app a book?"