- Science
- Not Exactly Rocket Science
I’ve Got Your Missing Links Right Here (Oct. 17, 2015)
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Top picks
Me at the Atlantic:
- No, Scientists Have Not Found the ‘Gay Gene’
- What You Can Learn From Hunter-Gatherers’ Sleeping Patterns
- The Crowdsourcing Site That Wants to Pool Our Genomes
- Turning Pigs Into Organ Donors
- Searching for the Genes That Are Unique to Humans
- Taking the Uncertainty Out of Genetic Screening for Cancer Risk
A good profile of “Planetary Protection Officer” Catherine Conley, by Kenneth Chang
This is a superb op/ed about the folly of big science prizes, like the Nobels. By Vinay Prasad
This plant exploits dung beetles by making nuts that look like poo. Isn’t nature beautiful? By Elif Batuman
What If Everything Your Doctor Told You About Breast Cancer Was Wrong? Essential piece from Christie Aschwanden on why mammograms are largely ineffective
Ebola panic a year later: Why the worst predictions didn’t come true. By Tara Smith.
Two pieces by the peerless Carl Zimmer: one on the first ancient human genome from Africa and another on why elephants rarely get cancer
This is amazing. Can you evolve into a duck? From the good people at Clickhole.
Famous astronomer Geoff Marcy sexually harassed many students for years. Important story from Azeen Ghorayshi, leading to actual change. Ross Andersen has a great follow-up: “Without genuine atonement, there is no going forward.”
The Tragic Neglect of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. By Olga Khazan
This stone is a marker of one millionaire’s personal vendetta against gravity
Rose Eveleth has a list of what not to write about prosthetics.
“It isn’t that he is too easy to see. It is that he doesn’t appear to see us at all.” Helen Macdonald on manufactured safari experiences.
Jess Zimmerman on a con-man who reinvented himself as a reality TV magician.
Very early modern human teeth found in China challenge our ideas about the date of ancient human migrations. By Ewen Callaway
How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously. By Joe Fassler
Science
Madagascar’s frogs are in trouble and people aren’t doing enough to help
Why are firstborn children 12% more likely to be nearsighted?
A really interesting history of the continually changing definitions of empathy
What Pauline Cafferkey’s relapse with Ebola means
“You can’t say Earth is your favorite planet. That would be obnoxious. Like saying your spirit animal is a human.”
“Where it hangs, the stars struggle to shine. It’s as if someone outlined a portion of the sky & dimmed the lights”
Neuroscientists surprised to find new neurons in C.elegans
125 million year old fossil shows organs & hair.
Meet the Mashco — or the Nomole, the name they prefer — an Amazonian tribe emerging from lifetimes of isolation.
CIA torture survivors sue psychologists who designed infamous program
A new hope: captive-bred, vaccinated Tasmanian Devils returned to the wild
Watch flesh-eating beetles strip this body down to the bone
Wire Animal Sculptures that Look Like Scribbled Pencil Drawings by David Oliveira
A report from ASHG15, including a summary of the panel I shared with the amazing Liz Neeley and Andrea Downing
Not photoshop: the world’s largest marsh is growing bright red grass
Possible immunity to Ebola in some women from Guinea, says slightly confused report.
DNA-based artwork authentication
Hallucinations: “relying more heavily on prior knowledge than on the actual sensory info”
Poorly-designed animal experiments in the spotlight
Where in the world could the first CRISPR baby be born? A look at the legal landscape of 12 countries
Sequencing… in spaaaaaaaaaaace
Gene-editing record smashed in pigs
Andrew Gelman weighs in on the stats behind that terrible gay epigenetics study
Chemistry Nobel goes to DNA repair, the field where I spent two abortive years as a PhD student. One of the quotes in this piece is hilarious.
Why a trawl through Eurekalert is like an existential death by a thousand painful cuts.
“I think the microbes might almost deserve it more than I do” – recent Nobel laureate
Love that palaeo-artists are getting some love at The Atlantic
In this economics replication project cooperation with original authors increased replications from a third to half
Miscellaneous
If a Pulitzer-nominated 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.
“Controlling these women was considered important to the defense effort”
Rent an Airbnb with 6 million skeletons in its closet
Really interesting: the sexism of the standardised American kitchen
Archaeologists ousted by ISIS return to ancient Iraqi cave
