I’ve Got Your Missing Links Right Here (Oct. 3, 2015)

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Top picks

Me at the Atlantic:

• The Surprising Genealogy of Your Brain
• How People Living at Earth’s Extremes Reveal the Genome’s Best Tricks
• Save the Parasites (Seriously) Alex Witze profiles four diverse voices in the debate over building a huge telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea

Here’s Nadia Drake on the recent news about flowing water on Mars, Lee Billings on why searching for life in that water will be really hard, and Rachel Feltman on our reaction to science news: ” Do we really have to pick between accepting things wholesale and becoming convinced we’re being duped?”

Jamie Shreeve’s piece on Homo naledi is amazingly good.

“An Alfred Hitchcock film helped to prove one patient had been conscious while in a coma-like state for 16 years” By Tom Stafford.

Science/news/writing

“Scientists are just specially-educated versions of the guys in the coffee shops.”

Every Solar System Image You’ve Ever Seen is Wrong. Till Now.

Researchers identify a handful of genes that help bacteria in the mouse gut adapt to dietary changes.

The Ambon damselfish can tell individuals apart from their faces

Scientists warn that gene-edited micropigs may be a distraction from more serious researDAAWWWW LOOKIT SO CUUUUTE

“The organizers of a conference for stutterers argue that the condition should be considered just another way of speaking”

Bill Gates Just Gave $6 Million To Genetically Engineer An HIV Vaccine (that’s not really a vaccine)

Resting bitch connectomes are totally going to be a thing. (Some of the language in this piece is pretty troubling.)

Shell is abandoning its controversial Arctic drilling plans

“Science is a great democratizer in its way: It allows people to do what they want with the facts”

“Cormorants, it turns out, have been exasperating people in many places for many, many years”

An effort to sequence thousands of people’s genomes reaches the end of the beginning.

How a Fossil Can Reveal the Color of a Dinosaur

CT scans of Pompeii victims show that they had perfect teeth

In the absence of a blood meal, some malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in East Africa feed on an invasive weed

Bacteria in ancient flea may [probably not] be ancestor of the Black Death

Next up from climate change: shell-crushing crabs invading Antarctica

Wait, WHAT? Hawksbill turtles are flourescent?

When it comes to cancer, is one metaphor better than another?

Heh/wow/huh

Fantastic and sometimes surprising aerial photographs of London

A compilation of every time R2D2 screams.

Volcanically induced lightning is AMAZING.

The two times I’ve dialled into a press conference, this has been exactly my reaction

Nation Demands NASA Stop Holding Press Conferences Until They Discover Some Little Alien Guys

Epic work on this headline

Internet/journalism/writing

The only thing I have to add to Megan Garber’s ode to MacGyver is a nod towards the EPIC THEME SONG

The ladder at the center of a centuries-old religious tussle

“Judgmental moralizers have had a heyday with Pompeii over the years.”

How do you pitch a freelance story to a site or magazine? Some quick advice for those new to pitching