Top thirteen picks

“It’s not a disease. It doesn’t need curing.” Steve Silberman talks to John Robison, a “free-range Aspergian” and best-selling author.

How to fund research so that it generates insanely great ideas, not pretty good ones – an awesome piece by Tim Harford.

Looking for empathy – v.good account of fMRI experiments in action, by Kristina Bjoran. I’m very dubious about whether this approach will yield anything, but Bjoran acknowledges and discusses the controversies about fMRI and describes the process well.

A great three-part series on Alan Turing’s homosexuality & how it was treated as a mental illness, by Romeo Vitelli.

Beautiful article on how one man’s death saved the lives of seven others

How ‘Hotel-Room Journalism’ Uncovered a Qaddafi Bunker

You might get cancer. Oh and your dad isn’t your dad. How a 23andMe test profoundly changed a woman’s life

A “kinder, gentler rib spreader” by Carl Zimmer

Plague in LA. And the man who gave plague his name. This blog is two-posts old but *what posts*!

Prophecy Fail. Vaughan Bell explores what happens to doomsday cults when the world inconsiderately refuses to end.

Levees can make things worse. A great and relevant post by Anne ...