EMU EGGS ONLINE: Revelations from UW Oceanography Postdoctoral Fellow Beverly Johnson about early humans’ involvement in the extinction 50,000 years ago of 85 percent of Australia’s large animal population generated some interest on the Internet recently. Both the Discovery Channel’s Web site and News.exite.com ran short features explaining how Johnson learned about dramatic climate changes in Australia—some the result of fires set by these early human inhabitants—by studying the carbon content of ancient emu eggshells. The research was first reported in Science, in a paper co-authored by Johnson.

NATURAL HISTORY: The American Museum of Natural History in New York recently welcomed its newest permanent exhibit, which was four years in the making. During that time, teams of scientists from the museum traveled all over the world to gather examples of life to illustrate Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. A New York Times article covering the opening of this exhibit reported that one of these expeditions was done in conjunction with three scholars from the University of Washington: Oceanography Professor John Delaney, Oceanographer Veronique Robigou and Acting Assistant Professor of Oceanography Deborah Kelley. Last summer, the group sent a robotic vehicle to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 200 miles off the coast of British Columbia to gather sulfide chimneys, intriguing rock formations that result when mineral-filled hot water flows up from vents in the ocean floor. Scientists believe these rare samples will provide clues about the emergence of some of the first forms of life.

SEX-SURVEY METHODS: In covering the release of Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press), a controversial new book by Julia A. Ericksen, associate professor of sociology at Temple University, The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed peers of Ericksen’s whose scholarly work on sexuality was critiqued in the book. One was UW Professor of Sociology Pepper J. Schwartz. An author of several self-help books, including The Great Sex Weekend, Schwartz conducted a study on couples in the 1970s that appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. Ericksen took issue with that study for its lack of random sampling and what she perceived as other methodological weaknesses. Schwartz, who had reviewed Ericksen’s original manuscript for Harvard and advised against publishing it, responded in the Chronicle article by saying, “I think it’s bad scholarship. I don’t believe (Ericksen has) read the voluminous research she cites.”

A SMALL PROGRAM WITH A BIG BANG: Astronomy graduate student Luis Mendoza is parlaying his expansive knowledge of the Web and the programs that make it navigable, such as Java, into a groundbreaking approach to research. The journal Science recently featured him in a news story for being the first to electronically publish an astrophysics paper using an interactive Java applet. The program allows those reading Mendoza’s paper to do calculations of the generation of light isotopes during the big bang. It can be found at http://www.astro.washington.edu/research/bbn. The Science article stated, “Although (Mendoza’s) project was modest . . . it bears watching in a field that has been a scientific bellwether in the use of electronic media and the Web.” ¶