1) First, a post from the past: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.
2) Weird search query of the week: “are you allowed to drink alcohol in class.”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “Are we still evolving”:
You know what would actually be a hoot for a documentary?
What if we ran SNP chips on several people who study Neandertals, and I tell them which Neandertal parts they have, all in front of the cameras.
That would be so much fun!
4) 4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:
To make a dent in brown snake populations, feed them poison-stuffed mice; to devastate brown snake populations, create robots to do the job for you. That’s what conservationists want to do in Guam to stop these pesky reptiles from further destroying the native bird population. The robots would have to stuff mice with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen (poisonous to snakes), glue the mice to cardboard strips, and then attach paper streamers to these monstrosities—all so that these modern day Trojan horses get lodged in the snake’s forest canopy when they’re lobbed out of airplanes (and hopefully wind up in a snake’s tummy).
But that’s not all the the mischief that robots have been up to recently:
The U.S. Navy wants to start dabbling in robots too: Semi-autonomous micro-robot swarms that could themselves manufacture their own robots. Cute, huh? In a project proposal for scientists, the Navy says it’s looking for a few good robots that can “pick and place, dispense liquids, print inks, remove material, join components” and “move cooperatively” to manufacture “novel materials and structures.” Prepare now for the robot apocalypse! (No, ...
It’s smelly week on NCBI ROFL! All week long we’ll feature the funniest papers about the science of stink. Enjoy!
Gustofacial and olfactofacial responses in human adults.
“Adults’ facial reactions in response to tastes and odors were investigated in order to determine whether differential facial displays observed in newborns remain stable in adults who exhibit a greater voluntary facial control. Twenty-eight healthy nonsmokers (14 females) tasted solutions of PROP (bitter), NaCl (salty), citric acid (sour), sucrose (sweet), and glutamate (umami) differing in concentration (low, medium, and high) and smelled different odors (banana, cinnamon, clove, coffee, fish, and garlic). Their facial reactions were video recorded and analyzed using the Facial Action Coding System. Adults’ facial reactions discriminated between stimuli with opponent valences. Unpleasant tastes and odors elicited negative displays (brow lower, upper lip raise, and lip corner depress). The pleasant sweet taste elicited positive displays (lip suck), whereas the pleasant odors did not. Unlike newborns, adults smiled with higher concentrations of some unpleasant tastes that can be regarded as serving communicative functions. Moreover, adults expressed negative displays with higher sweetness. Except for the “social” smile in response to unpleasant tastes, adults’ facial ...
Earlier this week at a scientific conference in Boston, HIV researchers announced a remarkable success in countering the virus’ drain on the immune system. But this early step is far from a cure.
Why it’s exciting:
Carl June and colleagues tested six male patients who already had HIV and were taking a standard antiviral regimen. Like many HIV patients, the drugs helped them, but their counts of immune cells stayed low. June’s team tested a therapy created by Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California, that alters a patient’s actual white blood cells to make them more HIV-resistant.
Researchers removed a sample of CD4+ T cells, the type of immune cells affected by HIV, from each man and used Sangamo’s enzyme to disrupt the CCR5 gene, which encodes a protein that HIV uses to enter CD4+ cells. The engineered cells were then infused back into the patients. Immune-cell counts subsequently rose for five of the six patients who received the therapy. “It’s very exciting,” says John Rossi, a molecular biologist at the City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute in Duarte, California. “If they did ...
Apparently July 12th, 2011, is now a hard date for the publication of George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, the 5th book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin has confirmed the date on his website: “Barring tsunamis, general strikes, world wars, or asteroid strikes, you will have the novel in your hands on July 12. I hope you like it.” He even has a late-1990s style countdown going. For what it’s worth, the first book, A Game of Thrones, came out in the summer of 1996. That means that a 10 year old starting the series in 1996 would be 25 now. In all probability this is going to be ~10 books, so who knows how old that 10 year will be when it’s all done.
Personally, I found that the last book was kind of a let down. Amazon reviewers seem to agree, as books 1-3 got 4.5 stars, but book 4 only 3. If Martin can’t bounce back, I assume that this series going to go the way of The Wheel of Time (before it was resurrected ...
Matt Lamkin argues that universities shouldn’t ban cognitive-enhancing drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. Lamkin is a lawyer and, like myself, a master’s candidate in bioethics. He rightly believes that a ban would do little to promote fairness or safety among students. The rule followers would be at a disadvantage while the rule-breakers would be at a greater safety risk. But Lamkin doesn’t believe we, as a society, should be ok with cognitive enhancement usage. Instead, he argues:
The word “cheating” has another meaning, one that has nothing to do with competition. When someone has achieved an end through improper means, we might say that person has “cheated herself” out of whatever rewards are inherent in the proper means. The use of study drugs by healthy students could corrode valuable practices that education has traditionally fostered. If, for example, students use such drugs to mitigate the consequences of procrastination, they may fail to develop mental discipline and time-management skills.
On the other hand, Ritalin might enable a student to engage more deeply in college and to more fully experience its internal goods—goods she might be denied without that assistance. The distinction suggests that a ...
Although well over 500 planets orbiting other stars are known to exist — and we know of many, many more awaiting confirmation — direct images of the planets are very rare. That’s because stars are billions of times brighter than planets, and the planets tend to huddle so closely to their star that their feeble light gets overwhelmed.
But it’s possible, and we have several images of such exoplanets. One of them is Beta Pictoris b, a super-Jupiter orbiting the star Beta Pic (as we in the know call it) about as far out as Saturn orbits the Sun. Its existence was confirmed in 2009, but it was also seen in earlier images in 2003 and 2008. The motion of the planet from one side of the star was obvious, and now observations from March 2010 again show it has moved as it orbits the star:
Pretty cool! These infrared images from the Very Large Telescope all have the starlight removed to show the faint planet (the faint rings and other blobs are optical effects and can be ignored). The upper left picture is from 2003; the upper ...
[This is the first of three intertwined posts on PKMzeta - the molecule that keeps our memories intact]
We’re used to the idea that we become more forgetful with age. As time passes, our memories naturally fade and weaken, and that’s if we’re lucky enough to avoid traumatic accidents or diseases like Alzheimer’s. But Reut Shema, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has found a possible way of preventing this decline, and even reversing it.
By loading the brains of rats with a protein called PKMzeta, she managed to strengthen their memories, even old and faded ones. “Multiple old memories were robustly enhanced. These results have no precedent,” says Todd Sacktor, who led the study together with Yadin Dudai.
PKMzeta is the engine of memory. This single protein behaves like a machine that constantly works to keep our memories intact. Switch it off, and we forget things permanently. It’s our lone defence against a constant tide of forgetfulness that threatens to revert our brains back to a blank slate (see “Exposing the memory engine”).
In 2007, Shema, Dudai, and Sacktor showed how important PKMzeta is by inactivating it in the brains of rats using a chemical called ZIP. They trained the rodents to avoid an artificial sweetener before injecting ZIP into the part of their brain involved in taste. The chemical irreversibly erased their distaste for sweetener. Even if they’d learned to avoid it a month earlier (several years in human terms), they forgot all about it once ZIP had blocked their PKMzeta. The protein’s powers aren’t limited to taste. Shema, Sacktor and others have since disrupted all sorts of memories by blocking PKMzeta, from old fears to motor skills to the location of objects.
These were a compelling result but the team hadn’t entirely sealed their case. “People have done science where you block things to see what happens, but you don’t really know what’s going on,” explains Karim Nader, a memory researcher at McGill University, who has worked with Sacktor before. ”You think it’s the equivalent of a smart bomb, but maybe it’s a dirty bomb. You block something in the brain and there are eight million things that could happen. So you have to enhance it and see if you have the opposite effect.”
And that’s exactly what Shema has now done. Once again, she taught rats to avoid the taste of sweetener. This time, a few days before their training, she infected the rats’ brains with viruses carrying PKMzeta. With extra copies of the protein at hand, the rats were more likely to remember their distaste for sweetener. Even if Shema injected the viruses a week after the rats’ training, when their aversion to the sweetener had started to fade, the extra PKMzeta enhanced their dulled memories.
“That’s the grand slam,” says Nader. “It’s got to be that molecule.”
Sacktor thinks that PKMzeta is unique in being able to boost old memories in healthy animals. In 2007, Li-Huei Tsai managed to reinstate lost memories in rats by chemically blocking a group of proteins called histone deacetylases. These chemicals stop DNA from scrunching up, which makes the genes within it easier to reach. But Tsai only did this in rats that suffered from a type of dementia. “That’s not the same thing as enhancing a normal animal’s old memories and making them stronger,” says Sacktor.
There are also many ways of strengthening memories in their earliest stages, when they first form and when they move from short-term to long-term storage. Rehearing the same information can help, as can a good nap. Just last month, I reported on a protein called IGF-II that can do the same. “But what we have with PKMzeta is unprecedented, in that you can take old memories that have already been around for a week and make them stronger,” says Sacktor. “That’s what’s really different about this.”
The viruses apparently weren’t just flooding the brain with PKMzeta, indiscriminately strengthening all the nearby synapses. Instead, the extra protein appears to have ended up in some synapses but not others. “This in a sense is just as remarkable,” says Sacktor. “You put in more of it and you don’t screw up the whole system. PKMzeta somehow knows how to fit into the memories that are already there.” Sacktor thinks that PKMzeta is drawn to itself. It somehow ends up in the right places and strengthens connections that have already been tagged by existing PKMzeta.
“Think about zeroes and ones on a hard disk,” he says. Removing PKMzeta with ZIP is like erasing information by flipping all the ones to zeroes. “Now we’re saying we’re putting in more ones, but it’s like they’re going where the other ones are, rather than randomly going to ones or zeroes.” This strange homing ability could help us integrate new information to existing memories, or to make sense of our memories over long periods of time. It’s the strangest aspect of PKMzeta and the one that Sacktor is most eager to crack. (See “Todd Sacktor talks about the memory engine”)
For now, David Sweatt, who studies memory at the University of Alabama, says that the new study is a “significant step forward” that greatly strengthens the role for PKMzeta in memory. “The identification of PKMzeta activators as potential cognition-enhancing agents is particularly exciting.”
But Sacktor is rightly cautious about any applications. “First of all, I don’t think we’re going to be using viruses!” he says. Rather than introducing extra copies of the PKMzeta gene, the ultimate goal is to work out how the brain makes the protein itself and give that process a boost. Even then, it’s difficult to say anything about benefits or risks, when people have only done studies in rats.
“One really doesn’t know how this would work out in people,” says Sacktor. Remembering every experience in painful detail might not be a pleasant or useful experience. “I think the point is more for people whose memories are falling apart because of neurodegeneration. There could be good and bad things about enhancing memory, but in people who are losing their memory, I think it makes sense. If people can’t remember whether they left their stove on or they can’t remember their children…”
Reference: Shema, R. (2011). Enhancement of Consolidated Long-Term Memory by Overexpression of Protein Kinase Mz in the Neocortex Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1200215
Image by KayVee
More on PKMzeta
More on memory:
While modeling plasma flows deep inside the sun, scientists may have found an explanation for why some sunspots cycles (like the most recent one) are weaker than others. “It’s the flow speed during the cycle before that seems to dictate the number of sunspots. Having a fast flow from the poles while a cycle is ramping up, followed by a slow flow during its decline, results in a very deep minimum.”
Risky business: In defending President Obama’s vision for space exploration that relies upon commercial space companies, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says the country must “become unafraid of exploration. We need to become unafraid of risks.”
Bad timing: Just as Apple unveils its new iPad—and Steve Jobs uses the opportunity to gloat about his company’s superiority in apps compared to Google’s Android system—Google had to take 21 apps off the Android Market because they were infected with malware.
The journals of Harvey Cushing, the father of neurosurgery, include admirable documentation of his own mistakes—giving medical historians a window into the birth of modern surgery around the turn of the 20th ...
I received a very interesting email from Alan Stern — head of the New Horizons Pluto flyby mission, and who, for a year, was NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.
Here’s what it said:
The attached open letter was sent to Congress today after being signed by over 55 space leaders.
The letter urges Congress to fully fund NASA’s plan to use commercial companies to carry crew to the Space Station.
Among the letter’s signatories are an unusually broad group of former NASA executives and advisors, former astronauts, CEOs and directors of firms large and small, space scientists, space journalists, and others. We include 14 former NASA astronauts, 5 former NASA senior executives, 13 educators and nonprofit leaders, and 24 space industry leaders from a wide variety of firms and institutions, both large and small.
I am a big advocate of this, having written many times that NASA should be exploring and creating new technologies, but should not be in the business of hauling stuff to space. That is better — and more cheaply — done by commercial contractors.
I’ve put the entire letter online here for you to read.
Here’s one ...
One of the recent episodes of NOVA ScienceNow was entitled “How Does the Brain Work?” On this week’s Point of Inquiry, I asked Dr. Tyson about the episode and what it found. Here’s a transcript, from around minute 6:20 of the show:
Tyson: Science exists, in part, in large measure, because the data taking faculties of the human body are faulty. And what science does as an enterprise is provide ways to get data, acquire data from the natural world that don’t have to filter through your senses. And this ensures, or at least minimizes as far as possible, the capacity of your brain to fool itself.
So to the neuroscientist, the brain is this amazing organ. And to the physical scientist, it’s like, ‘get it out of here.’ Leave it at home. Just bring your box, and have the box make the measurements. So that’s an interesting duality.
The brain–you can survive. My favorite among these is how easily the brain recognizes patterns even when there are no patterns there. You can statistically show there are no patterns, but your brain creates patterns. And the long term explanation for that has always been, it’s better to think that’s a tiger in the bushes, and then run away from it, and have it not be a tiger, than for it to be a tiger and not know it’s there and then you get eaten.
So the people who did not see patterns in the history of the species got eaten by creatures that were in fact making patterns in the visual din of the forest.
Q: The birth of science is, of course, the attempt to override this–and Francis Bacon talked about the “Idols of the Mind,” and that’s essentially what we’re now understanding through neuroscience. But it suggests there’s something about human nature where, scientific thinking is always going to be kind of the kid who gets left out of the group.
Tyson: I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going on for thousands of years. But it hasn’t. It’s relatively late in the activities of a culture. Science as we now practice it…this is a relatively modern, that’s been going on for no more than 400 years. And you look at how long civilizations have been around, and you say, there’s a disconnect there.
Clearly, it’s not natural to think this way; otherwise, we would have been doing it from the beginning. And meanwhile, mathematics is the language of the universe–fascinatingly so–and yet science and math tend to be the two subjects that you will commonly hear people complain about in their time in school.
And so, I remain perennially intrigued by that fact: that the operations of the universe can be understood through your fluency in math and science, and it’s math and science that give people the greatest challenges in the school system.
Again, you can listen to the full episode here.
Sometimes the strangeness and beauty of nature come together in a scene so lovely, so surreal, that words fail. Such is the case in Phil Hart’s spectacular gallery of pictures showing bioluminescence in Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia:
Oh, my. Can you believe this is real? I had to compress the file to get it to work on the blog, so please click it to see it in higher-resolution, and also look at the other astonishing pictures in his gallery.
Phil has a page describing in detail the pictures. In this case, a 1.5 hour exposure shows the glow from the trillions of Noctiluca Scintillans protists in the lake, as well as the trails of stars as they circle the southern celestial pole. That light on the horizon is not the Moon, but a house or some other man-made object. I love how the reflection curves and breaks up near the shore.
Phil’s pictures are simply breath-taking, and you just have to go and take a look. I am continually astonished at just how beautiful and surprising nature can be. It’s thrilling to see such disparate pieces ...
Light is pushy. The physical pressure of photons is what allows for solar sail space missions that ride on sunlight, and what allows for dreams of lasers that will push those sails even faster. And light can trap objects, too: Optical tweezers can hold tiny objects in place. Pulling an object with light, however, is another matter. Though it’s counter-intuitive to think you could create backward-tugging force with a forward propagating laser and create a real-life tractor beam, the authors of a new physics paper write that they have shown a way it could be done.
Jun Chen’s research team says that the key is to use not a regular laser beam, but instead what’s called a Bessel beam. Viewed head-on, a Bessel beam looks like one intense point surrounded by concentric circles—what you might see when you toss a stone into a lake. The central point in a Bessel beam suffers much less diffraction than a standard laser, and so scientists can use them for precision operations like punching a hole in a cell.
Paul French talks about his new book, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. And rest assured, this is one measure by which America is still #1 in relation to China….
Click here to view the embedded video.
The video is pretty shaky so is every version out there. The Glory Mission was to measure aerosols in the atmosphere and to measure how much solar radiation the atmosphere receives from the sun.
“Was” is the key word because the mission was aborted because of a malfunction that caused the fairing not to release. It’s not the first time either. in 2009 the Orbiting Carbon Observatory riding the same model Taurus rocket met the same fate and in fact design changes to the joints holding the fairing in place were made.
Oh well and that’s about all I am going to say about that. 
On a brighter note The United Launch Alliance (sounds very sci-fi-esque and I like it) successfully launched the Second Orbital Test Vehicle also known as the X 37B. The launch was webcast live and went off with out a hitch, very impressive. Apparently owing to the type of mission there is no replay available. Pity too, because I did watch and it was spectacular. Here’s a little background on the X 37 available on the web, might be good to take it with a grain of salt.
The orbital information is not being released but there was quite an effort to spot the spacecraft during the first launch nearly a year ago. Should be fun to see if the cat and mouse game occurs this time my guess is: of course it will.
This is pretty wild: a partial solar eclipse on March 4, 2011 as seen from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory! Watch as the Moon slips in front of the face of the Sun in this video:
Cool! In this far-ultraviolet view, you can see magnetic activity on the Sun’s surface, like arcing gas eruptions and sunspots (which are dark in visible light, but very bright in the UV), and the roiling, bubbling motion as pockets of hot solar gas rise and fall. Then, suddenly, the Moon makes its appearance!
When I first saw this, I was surprised the Moon appeared to reverse direction. But after a moment’s thought I figured it out: parallax! Here’s how it works:
On the right is a diagram (not to scale, duh) I put together to illustrate the situation. SDO orbits the Earth, and I drew it so that it orbits counterclockwise. When SDO is at the bottom of the diagram, it’s moving to the right (position 1). A little while later (position 2) it’s moving to the left.
Now imagine the Sun is way off the top of the diagram. SDO stares at ...
Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, thinks he may have found bacteria in a meteorite.
Yes, you read that right. The question is, is he right?
I don’t know. Dr. Hoover has published his findings in the online Journal of Cosmology (see below for more about this journal), and it was reported today by Fox News (thanks to Sheril at The Intersection for the tip).
Basically, Hoover found structures inside a rare type of meteorite — the Orgueil meteorite which fell in France in 1864 — that look very much like microbes of some sort. Here’s an example from the paper:
Those are odd and intriguing formations, to be sure. If I were scanning through a meteorite and saw those, I’d be pretty surprised too.
But appearances can be deceiving. Are these actually fossilized microscopic life forms?
Hoover makes several claims to show that a non-biotic origin for these structures is very unlikely. I am not an expert and won’t cast my vote either way here. This is not the first time Hoover has made such claims; he gave ...
UPDATE: SOLVED by Sean at 12:02 CDT
Tom and I are getting ready to run a bonus riddle later this month. I’ll have an announcement for you in a couple of days.
In the meanwhile, I think it’s about time to ring your chimes with another Sci Fi subject. I wouldn’t want you to get bored and complacent over there. Besides, I like playing around with Sci Fi subjects, and it’s all about me, right? Me, me, me, me, me… oh! Sorry about that. I had a moment.
Today’s answer is a Sci Fi concept.
NASA image - you know who this is, right?
Like all good Sci Fi concepts, you’ll find this rooted in reality.
This concept has been kicked around since about 700 BCE.
It became more familiar to us in the late 19th century.
Image by Ferdinand Schmutzer 1921
This concept shows up in a lot of strange places; like through a looking glass.
This might be a one-way street.
Sometimes this happens spontaneously in fiction; just don’t take a nap at a mountain.
This iconic image has been around for a while
You’ll find this concept in places where you wouldn’t expect it to be lurking; like in a Dickens novel.
It’s even made an appearance in pop music.
Lots of people today - but you should know this one
There you go – one fun, fast riddle. I’m hanging out in the comments, so don’t abandon me!
If true–and not a case of contamination or mistaken identity–this could be big:
Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.
Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.
For now I’ll say I’m intrigued, but also somewhat skeptical–at least until we learn more. What do readers think?
[Update: Phil's got a great post up on the possibility of fossilized microscopic life forms.]
Look, I have a homepage. I wanted a site that pulls together my various social media stuff as well as a record of my other writing and speaking engagements.
Top twelve picks
“Dead world at sunset.” I’m not going to spoil the topic but just read this, okay? This is beautiful, lyrical and amazingly tight writing, of the kind that makes me want to be a better writer. Hats off to Jessa Gamble. My favourite thing in a week of top stuff.
“Forming, finding or defending a vacuum-sealed echo-chamber online is extremely difficult, if at all possible.” Bora Zivkovic destroys the “internet is an echo chamber” meme
“Cognitive science is full of crap – except when it’s not. Which makes it like most science, only more so” – a cogent analysis and defence by David Dobbs
“Does school science still divide people into “pure scientists, applied scientists & failures”? By Alice Bell
A beautiful ode to the photon, by Lily Asquith
“The mere existence of whales suggests that is possible to suppress cancer many-fold better than is done in humans.” Carl Zimmer on Peto’s Paradox
“Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Churches believe they should maintain a home for all of God’s creatures around their places of worship. The result? Forests ringing churches.” An amazing post by Delene Beeland on the “church forests” of Ethiopia
“In the 1970s, he transplanted an entire monkey head onto another monkey’s body. And, for a short time, the severed head lived.” By Hannah Waters
In a medical detective tale worthy of House, a top plague scientist dies of… the plague. It’s more surprising than you think.
“The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming.” Great Ian Sample feature on Richard Muller, the Berkeley Earth project, climate science & open data
No one puts baby in a cohort! Mark Henderson on a new study that’s recruiting 100,000 UK babies (paywall). Meanwhile, Helen Pearson writes about the “study of a lifetime” – a group of thousands of Brits whose health has been tracked since 1946.
What made scientist/murderer Amy Bishop snap? Amy Wallance has the story.
Science/news/writing
Lab to red carpet: an NYT piece on famous actors with science backgrounds, including Natalie Portman (here she is on Pubmed – she’s the fifth author). And from Wikipedia: “Due to her sci pubs, Portman is among small number of actors w/ a finite Erdos-Bacon number”
Oscar science: based on movie-star faces, we now prefer younger, more feminine women… and men
“Comment Is Free… sometimes what they publish is worth every penny of that.” ZING! Language Log destroys a piece which claims that languages with good spelling systems have no word for dyslexia.
The strange history of tropical neurasthenia, a “relatively short-lived colonial affliction”.
The hairy beast with seven fuzzy sexes
Terrorist taunts may tell attack timing. “”It is very possible we may be identifying the linguistic predictors of bin Laden himself.”
Obama orders investigations into 1940s experiments that deliberately infected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhoea
“A large crowd of bystanders & a tired operator led to a mistaken direction of exploration.” Early neurosurgery failures, by Emily Anthes (the piece, not the failures).
“I’d always dreamed of walking into a room stacked ceiling to floor w/hippo skulls.” Hannah Waters on museum collections.
An orchid parasitising a fungus, by Lucas Brouwers
Here’s a great idea: let’s save practically no money by cutting 100% of the government’s poison control centers.
Are 10,000 buttons safer than one fancy screen? At this Russian nuke plant, yes. By John Pavlus
It’s not your imagination, that guy really IS taking a long time to buckle his %&$@ seatbelt. By SciCurious
China’s “heavenly horse“. And by “heavenly”, I mean “parasite-riddled”.
“Infested by the Wizard of Oz” – Vaughan Bell on delusional parasitosis
The “greenhouse effect” that’s actually cooling the world.
Mo Costandi on the increasingly shaky ‘broken mirror neurons‘ theory of autism
Visions of Africa shaped eye evolution.
Give postdocs a career, not empty promises, urges Jenny Rohn
Blum on Boom – why explosions in science class can be excellent
How many clocks of life are there?
By our powers combined, we are Global Virus Response Network
What was disgraced cloner Woo Suk Hwang doing in Libya? This story just keeps on giving.
They “superglued the [mantis shrimps] to Plexiglass & dropped stainless steel balls on them” by Matt Soniak
Even ideas – such as swimming strokes – conjure up colours for some synaesthetes
Costa Rica announces 2.47 million acre marine reserve
Heh/wow/huh
If we told you what this press release was about, we’d have to shoot you.
Hipster science (“My data don’t need to fit to your ‘model’.”)
You can order flesh-eating beetles through the post! Comes w/ free frog to start the skeletonising fun
XKCD on cladistics
Man draws perfect circle in less than a second. Man is nerd Jedi
C3P0 reminds “parents of earth” to make sure their children are “fully immunized” in awesome ’70s PSA
Golden-haired spider that looks like an ant. Nature! Hell yeah!
Psychologists – they’re all just screwing with each other.
A poster for Brian Cox’s next series?
Physics troll (not Internet kind) explains how physics ought to work
Heh. Scientists – all you do is stick PINS in stuff.
Gummi bear vs oxidation. Gummi bear loses.
DRAAAAAAAAINAGE. Awesome geo-art
James Delingpole, the gift that keeps on giving
“The success of MORDOR will open up the majority of the bone specimens previously not available for sampling”
Arnie, in calling for fossil fuel termination, quotes Conan: “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Blogging/journalism/internet/society
Gladwell, proven spectacularly wrong on social media, dismisses critics as pajama-wearing bloggers in Brooklyn. Really, Malcolm? You are critiquing us on sartorial grounds?
And the misleading headline of the week goes to the Independent. Based on this, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker says “Many Brit outlets do seem markedly fond of starting readers off with caution- and irony-free hyperbole, and then as a story proceeds titrating its consumers back to reality.” Great. Just great. England f**king expects, okay?
The Battle for Control – what people who worry about the internet are really worried about
A hive for long-form journalism on the Internet.
Fox News kept out of Canada by law saying that you can’t lie on broadcast news
I’m in the middle of a chain retraction
It’s the Inequality, Stupid. A great infographic.
When manning up involves pushing women out
Wow. German defense minister Guttenberg resigns after losing his PhD for a plagiarized thesis. Ivan Oransky has the story.
