- Science
- Not Exactly Rocket Science
I’ve got your missing links right here (2 June 2012)
Top picks
I’ve been short-listed for two categories in the Association of British Science Writers awards: feature, and communication of science in a non-science context. Dead chuffed. Also the latter category is in memory of Stephen White, who taught the 2-day course that convinced me I wanted to be a science writer. It’s an honour.
Animal Planet airs documentary about mermaids, misleads viewers, annoys Craig McClain and Brian Switek . This crap makes me thankful for science TV in the UK, which IMO is incredibly strong
“For the Yupno people in Papua New Guinea, rather than marching ever onward, time wends its way uphill.”
It’s sad to see a scientist like Zimbardo, and a format like TED, collide into such ridiculousness. Carl Zimmer absolutely destroys a talk and e-book of the same.
After everything almost died, the Earth took 10 million years to recover.
This is a masterful post: a conversation between an evolutionary psychologist and a biologist, by Jeremy Yoder
David Attenborough would sound great even if he live-narrated a tortoise shagging a shoe. Which he does
“He… slides both arm & probe deep into the rectum of a 500-kg rhino… The rhino lets out a doleful moan.” Must-read piece by Henry Nicholls on some last-ditch attempts to save the Sumatran rhino.
Six science writers talk about the questions that drive their books. In particular, read David Dobbs’ bit. He identified arguably the biggest challenge of science writer (“I tend to write about sci that’s pushing edge of evidence”) and includes some fab questions: “So just how full of sh*tare they — like, completely?”
Amazing! Long-lost evobiologist Margie Profet surfaces after a story about her in Psychology Today!
How a case of forgetting turned David Dobbs on to science. A great story.
Attempts to predict earthquakes may do more harm than good
Pete Etchells puts a stupid “equation for a perfect sandwich” press story to the test… with hilarious results!
Great reporting by NPR on the story that tuna carry radioactive particles: Nuclear Tuna Is Hot News, But Not Because It’s Going To Make You Sick
Birds Have Juvenile Dinosaur Skulls. (Dinosaurs displeased, would like them back)
I’ve always wondered! Alexis Madrigal explains the mechanics and meaning of that ol’ dial-up modem sound
Forget the Queen. Here’s are some blue-blooded individuals that save lives: horseshoe crabs
Science/news/writing
Lovely: on science, religion and the liberating embrace of uncertainty
A look at the various nutters who have tried to claim ownership over the Moon and/or planets
For 3rd year running, a mysterious mass die-off among Kazakhstan’s saiga antelope. Bacteria? Pesticides? SPACESHIPS??
“Dissolved iron may have been key to RNA-based life.” Williams’ quotes are wonderful here.
Chimps nest in trees to escape the humidity
Virginia Hughes wonders if neuroscience is undergoing a female revolution
Forget the hype: how close are we to a ‘forgetting pill?’
A 2nd-grader asks Neil Tyson whether 2 black holes can collide and swallow one another
“What did we get for this 40 years war” on cancer, asks Otis Brawley.
Seven Scientists Win Kavli Prizes; four are women. Excellent.
We can rebuild her. We have the technology. Robotic rehab helps paralyzed rats walk again
Trapped in the Ivory tower. Jeanne Gabarino looks at what scientists can do (and can’t do) to engage the public.
Is ADHD overdiagnosed? New paper says no, but as Neuroskeptic points out, it’s a bit dodgy
“The worms form slime tubes to help adhere to each other during copulation which may take as long as an hour”
“‘GMO’ is ‘OMG’ backwards.” Heh. Martin Robbins on the Rothamsted protests.
The largest volcanoes on our planet may take as little as a few hundred years to form and erupt
Craig Venter dreams of artificial life like some mystical shaman of synthetic biology
The undetected epidemic of Chagas – the new HIV?
Museum of Endangered Sounds preserves obsolete tech noises by
Flowers use Velcro cells to keep bees from blowing away
RoboZoo: Wired’s Menagerie of Robot Animals
Jennifer Ouellette explains the science of why she hates raw tomatoes and you might not.
“As scientific puzzles go, the origin of dogs may not be as important as the origin of the universe.” Really not the best lede, but the story’s good.
Top 10 new species of 2012, featuring the Mephisto worm and a blue tarantula
Published in the Journal of OMG SQUEEE: Dormice use their whiskers to navigate trees
This Nature piece on Rothamsted provides clues as to why the “anti-science” label is just misleading.
Troubling: armed extremists actually attacking nuclear and nanotechnology workers.
Olympicene: a molecule that looks like the Olympic rings.
Support for climate science doesn’t increase with scientific literacy, surprising no one who has been paying attention
Absolutely horrendous. Leuser the orang utan shot 62 times by villagers seeking “entertainment”
Inventors killed by their own inventions
Too predictably, Nobel laureate-turned-homeopathy-woo-pusher Luc Montagnier joins the anti-vax crowd. How the mighty fall.
Conservation triage – zoos allocate resources to species that might be saved, but give up on others
10 surprising things that bacteria like to eat (although, eyeroll at #9)
India is facing a female infanticide crisis
The problems with brain scans and misinterpretations thereof, by Vaughan Bell.
Bizarre case of a group that published the same article twice within 4 months… in same journal
Petition: Require free access over Internet to science journal articles from taxpayer-funded research
Heh/wow/huh
The Credible Hulk
The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions – an almanac of Victorian pranks
What if every tornado in the past 50 years left a neon blue scratch on the surface of the US?
Wonderful photos of London reflected in puddles
Genius. The Manhattan street grid as a global coordinate system.
MicroCT scan of an alligator embryo. Adorable. Sort of.
1920s paper said that Stegosaurus was a glider
Green tree python lures prey with its tail.
Internet/journalism/society
Frank Swain lays into the science of Prometheus with a hilarious review. Spoilers, obviously.
The tweet that begins (or not, as it turned out) the zombie apocalypse
It should worry British science journalists that this is how our international peers view us
This will be used for pranks, spam: Thunderclap unleashes tweet-storms for protests
Meet ‘Flame’, The Massive Spy Malware Infiltrating Iranian Computers
19yr-old secretly lived on AOL’s campus for months (subsisting only on free dialup CDs and discarded business models)
Slightly funny but frequently off-the-mark satire on science journalism
A lovely piece in praise of the humble paper clip – a design classic.
