#and i dont think this same phenomenon exists in other fields of science

[oflgtfol]

“But no one actually ‘looks’ through [modern telescopes]. Margaret Huggins lamented the shift from gazing at the heavens to squinting at tiny patches of light. Now we’ve gone much, much further. In today’s astronomy, photons of light from the sky, along with the celestial secrets they contain, are picked up by electronic detectors, converted into digital data and crunched through impossibly complex equations by some of the most powerful computers on the planet. In 2016, bricklayer-turned-astronomer Gary Fildes described visiting Chile’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in his best-selling book An Astronomer’s Tale. Incorporating four mirrors, each 27 feet wide, the VLT collects visible and infrared radiation and can distinguish points in the sky separated by less than a millionth of a degree. Here, at the forefront of today’s attempts to understand the stars, Fildes was struck by the sight of scientists hard at work in control rooms, eyes glued not to their telescopes but to banks of screens: ‘They didn’t look as if they had seen the real sky for days.’”

- The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars by Jo Marchant

[makingscipub]

Threads, worms and science communication

I thought I had written my last post about epigenetics. But then came along some ‘worms’ and I had to write another one.

I have written about worms once before on the Making Science Public blog, in the context of science communication. And this blog post too will reflect on worms in the context of science communication, but in a slightly different context.

In 2014, when I wrote my first worm post, twitter was eight years old but still evolving. Now we live in a twitterverse where science communicators can use ‘threads’, launched at the end of 2017, to knit together tweets into a science story. Some of the best science communication now happens in ‘threads’. And this is what happened on this occasion.

So what am I talking about? On 6 June a research group working in Tel Aviv around Oded Rechavi published an article in Cell entitled “Neuronal Small RNAs Control Behavior Transgenerationally”. The gist of the article was this, as summarised in the abstract: “In Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes, parental responses can transmit heritable small RNAs that regulate gene expression transgenerationally. In this study, we show that a neuronal process can impact the next generations.”

So the hero of the study is C. elegans, the worm of wonder I had talked about in my previous blog, but not in the context of epigenetics. What has this to do with epigenetics?

Worms and epigenetics

Epigenetics is a new field in genetics and genomics, which came to prominence around the year 2000 and about which I have written since 2013. It is still finding its feet and it is still struggling with definitions and concepts. One of the most contested notions is that of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’. This phenomenon has been observed in plants, worms and some rodents, but there is, as yet, no clear evidence that it exists in mammals/humans.

In an important article summarising some myths surrounding epigenetics, Edith Heard, a renowned epigenetics researcher, pointed out: “Since the human genome was sequenced, the term ‘epigenetics’ is increasingly being associated with the hope that we are more than just the sum of our genes. Might what we eat, the air we breathe, or even the emotions we feel influence not only our genes but those of descendants?” This is at the core of speculations surrounding epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

The worm study that caught my eye has to be seen in this context. It was announced under headlines such as “Worm parents pass on behaviours epigenetically to offspring”.

Even one of the most sceptical observers of research into transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, Kevin Mitchell, tweeted: “Some real transgenerational epigenetics… (in worms)”.

He also retweeted a ‘thread’ by the group leader, Oded Rechavi, which was a masterpiece of science communication, both verbal and visual – indeed, threading them both creatively together. We’ll come to that in a minute.

Epigenetic worms in the media

How was the study reported in the ‘mainstream media’? I had a quick look and found only four articles, all published in Israeli news outlets. I tracked down a few more on Google News. Here are some of the headlines in the print media: “Israeli study: Nervous system can transmit messages to future generations”; “Israel study says neurons, not just DNA, can affect progeny’s fate”; “Researchers say nervous system passes info to kids”; “Worms help Israeli scientists rewrite basics of genetics”.

Two things struck me: first the use of anthropomorphic terms like ‘kids’, a type of language that can create the wrong expectations, and the claim that this study overthrows basic genetics. This claim came also up in an online article on Breaking Israel News entitled “Small worms help Israeli researchers disprove basic dogma of modern biology”. This article was, I believe, the press release for the Cell study and contains a great artistic illustration of worms. It was picked up by eurekalert, where Rechavi is quoted as saying “It’s important to stress that we don’t know yet whether any of this translates to humans”.

In the past, some epigeneticists and philosophers of science have made claims about epigenetics overthrowing basic biology, claims that were greeted mainly with scepticism by other scientists.

Three other online articles reported on the study, one published in The Scientist and dryly entitled: “Worm parents pass on behaviors epigenetically to offspring”; one in Psychology Today seeing it as ‘disruptive’ to biology and neuroscience, and one in the Big Think linking it to ‘reincarnation’ (tongue in cheek)! There may be more. But let’s get to the thread.

Twitter threads

According to Twitter, “[a] thread on Twitter is a series of connected Tweets from one person. With a thread you can provide additional context, an update, or an extended point by connecting multiple Tweets together.”

Here is a random example of a ‘thread’ – there are longer and more extravagant ones out there. This one is about Mayan hieroglyphics, which I loved (it’s linked to a fantastic podcast). You can click on it and see how it goes…

Knitting a science story using words and images

So, what about this worm thread then, which got 423 retweets and 1,156 likes? Rechavi posted it in the afternoon of 6 June, just after his lab’s article came out in Cell. It starts with a bit of a firework of emojis, hashtags, and hyperlinks.

The hashtag uses a well-established epigenetic metaphor. The accompanying image (called ‘a summary model’ in the thread) provides an overview of the ‘flow’ of signals/memory, I suppose, between neurons, germline and behaviour.

The second tweet congratulates all the team members and especially the artist who created the illustration for the press release Beata Edyta Mierzwa and reproduces the sci-art image. See here. I think the image represents a tree of life/arteries of life populated by worms with little epigenetic ‘tags’ or post-it notes attached to them… but I might be wrong.

The third tweet writes about long-standing speculations about inheritance and is illustrated by a photo of a Greek statue representing a thinker. It ends by stressing: “But transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is still extremely controversial, especially in mammals”.

The fourth tweet goes into this controversy in a bit more detail, saying: “The reason it’s controversial is that there’s no good mechanism that can explain it. It was hypothesized a long time ago (19th century) that the germline is isolated from the soma, and that somatic responses (including neuronal responses) cannot become heritable”. The work presented in the thread puts forward a candidate mechanism.

This tweet is illustrated with a photo of the front cover of August Weismann’s seminal book The Germplasm – a theory of heredity (published in 1893). This tweet relates to what some news articles reported, such as one in the Big Think that stated: “Rechavi believes this research pushes back against biological dogma (the ‘Weissmann Barrier’) claiming that heritable information is segregated from somatic influences.” This seems to be much less cautious than the tweet, probably because it’s based on the ‘press release’.

As there are 17 tweets in this thread, I won’t summarise each one of them. Let’s just say each tweet is a combination of text and image. It uses images of many types and genres, such a diagrams, various plots and scatter grams, cartoons, microscopy images, photos, and so on..

However, I want to point out one more tweet, not for its image but for its text, as it engages in anthropomorphic language (also used in some headlines) which might confuse people and make them think that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has also been demonstrated in humans:

“MORE interestingly, if rde-4 great-grandchildren are derived from heterozygous great-grandparents that expressed rde-4 only in neurons, their chemotaxis behavior is much improved. The ancestors’ neurons control the behavior of the great-grandchildren”

Reception

The response to the thread was overwhelmingly positive with lots of tweets expressing congratulations. One tweet posted a compiled thread on something called ‘threader’, which you can read here. And there is an ‘unroll’ here on a thread reader.

You can also read the compiled text of the tweets on Reddit. There are only a few comments related to that text, but three of them are interesting. One continues the anthropomorphising of the worms and creates a great metaphor: “Grandpa worm sent a zip file of worm behavior instructions to grandbaby worm”.

Two others jump into a controversy surrounding transgenerational epigenetic inheritance that been reverberating through popular science for a while: “Lamarckism wasn’t as wrong as we thought.” While somebody else says (in a longer comment): “I definitely don’t want to dismiss this but I dont know if I’d call this ‘heritable’ in the same way DNA is heritable.” Discuss!

A new type of science communication

The worm study has provided me with a great opportunity to learn about threads and to alert readers of the Making Science Public blog to the fact that there are now new ways of making science public, using the old art of intertwining words and images (see also GIFs), texts and illustrations, art and science.

There is no yet a lot of research out there examining the use of twitter threads for science communication. I found one SciCommthreads hashtag on threads, but that’s about it. There must be more!

On a different but related note: I am looking forward to a new little project with Aleksandra Stelmach and Alan-Miguel Valdez examining the power of images in the construction of popular notions of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

Image: Wikimedia Commons: C. elegans, stained

The post Threads, worms and science communication appeared first on Making Science Public.

via Making Science Public http://bit.ly/2KOJ5Q7

[theconservativebrief]

Every spring, millions of students graduate high school with every intention of attending college.

By the fall, an astounding portion of them never show up to college.

This phenomenon is so common it has a name: “summer melt.” And the effects are stronger for students from a lower socioeconomic background.

Research by Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page shows that among students from a lower socioeconomic background, about one in five who planned to attend college don’t actually enroll. The melt rates are lower for more affluent students, but it’s still a significant number.

Much of the gap between poor and affluent students comes from the type of college they choose to attend. Poor kids are more likely to attend two-year community colleges — and the melt rates for those schools is quite high.

This means that a huge number of disadvantaged students — who had to overcome more obstacles than the average student to make it to the doorstep of college — never even go in the door.

”They’ve already made it through so much. They’ve come so far; they’re so close,” said Holly Morrow, who works at uAspire, which helps disadvantaged kids get to college. (uAspire provided data to Page and Castleman for this research.)

So why is this happening?

One high school counselor compared it to the story of Hansel and Gretel. She told researchers that during the school year, the counselors set out bread crumbs for students to follow. But once high school ends, “all of a sudden, the bread crumbs are gone and they have no idea where to go.” And that leads them to drift off the college-bound path.

But as experts have become more attuned to the problem, they have devised new ways to mitigate it. And it turns out that leaving a trail of new bread crumbs is relatively easy — and has dramatic effects on keeping kids on the path to college.

During the summer, students don’t have anyone responsible for putting out bread crumbs. This means they have to navigate the path to college by themselves — and they hit barrier after barrier.

They struggle to decode highly confusing financial aid letters, which don’t make clear how much money they need. They lack the finance background to make huge decisions about money, like taking out thousands of dollars in loans. And since they don’t have a clear idea of the path forward, they often put off key tasks — something all of us do.

”Any kind of complexity can often stop us in our tracks,” Page said. “You must have times where you say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to deal with that thing.’ But when you actually bite the bullet and do it, you think, ‘It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ “

So why are some students more likely to get lost in the forest, while others make it through to college?

Page and Castleman found that one huge factor is that some students have a guide: their own parents. If their parents attended college, they can help figure out the difference between, say, a loan and free money. They can tell them what to expect, and answer questions about the experience to come.

Another factor was that some students didn’t have the “soft skills” to call and ask an adult for help navigating the process — especially students from low-income backgrounds, who often had bad experiences asking adults for help, Page said.

This understanding of the barriers helped Page and Castleman develop a system that sprinkles and connects those missing bread crumbs.

In one experiment, Page and Castleman had counselors proactively reach out to college-bound students during the summer. This intervention had a pretty drastic impact on keeping poor students on the path to college.

But it also taught the researchers that the method of outreach was crucial. Phone and email aren’t the best way to reach out to students. They found much more success with texting and Facebook messaging.

This finding prompted them to develop a chatbot to text students with reminders about deadlines or required forms, automation that doesn’t drain the limited resources of college financial aid offices. If students needed help, they could interact with an artificially intelligent chatbot rather than a human.

”It feels you’re doing it yourself when a robot’s helping you,” one student told NPR. “It’s like a tool.”

When they tested the chatbot at Georgia State University, it reduced the percentage of students suffering from summer melt by 21 percent.

Page put it another way. She told me the chatbot is “essentially a naggy, knowledgeable parent for kids who aren’t necessarily growing up in households with parents who are knowledgeable about the college-going process.”

Now Georgia State plans to implement this chatbot as a permanent part of its matriculation tools.

This summer melt intervention is yet another example of the small nudges that can help disadvantaged students get on an even playing field with everyone else. But the invisible challenges don’t end there — and there are interventions that can greatly help disadvantaged students.

A few years ago, a research team led by Judy Harackiewicz at the University of Wisconsin Madison found disadvantaged students were more likely to abandon degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) after struggling in a challenging introductory course class, because they either lost interest or felt uncomfortable.

So researchers tested an intervention in which they had students write essays on how the material is personally relevant to them.

That small activity drastically improved the performance of first-generation students who were African-American, Hispanic, or Native American. The researchers suspected one possible reason is that this activity helped them “connect course material to important personal goals.”

In another experiment, Stanford researcher Greg Walton and his colleague Geoff Cohen theorized that disadvantaged students were concerned about belonging in their college environment — and this social concern was threatening to the point of hurting their academic performance.

So they conducted an intervention in which they put these students in the same room as other students and had them talk through their shared anxieties. The goal was to frame “social adversity as common and transient.”

This intervention was able to close achievement gaps between white and black students over their college careers.

Northwestern University’s Nicole Stephens found that first-generation college students — much like black students — struggle to keep up academically with students who have college-educated parents.

So before the semester, she had students sit in on a session about the importance of their class backgrounds and how it will shape their college experience, which she calls “difference education.” The idea was that this would help them contextualize why they may be experiencing college differently.

This tiny intervention had a striking effect on their outcomes.

”The first step is understanding what are the types of obstacles students face in a given context,” Stephens told me. “It comes from an iterative process, which starts with looking at what existing theories and psychology have to say about the question. Then you develop ideas about what might be an effective intervention.”

Walton, the Stanford social psychologist, said the fact that these small interventions work so well reveals just how many barriers there are for disadvantaged kids. “It’s not the America we aspire to,” he said.

These studies show us biases in even the most mundane mechanisms of the American education system, like navigating the summer between high school and college.

”The default cultural environment of a college or university is not neutral,” Stephens said. “But instead the values reflect the perspective of certain groups of students — of those who tend to have more power status in society, which tends to be white middle upper class.”

That said, some barriers to college are much harder to overcome for disadvantaged students, like being academically unprepared or not having the money. These stem from large, systemic issues.

But other barriers cost little to chip away at — which appears to be the case with summer melt.

”This is something that is solvable,” Morrow said.

Original Source -> Why so many poor kids who get into college don’t end up enrolling

via The Conservative Brief