"Just to put these in perspective, if these results are to be believed, not-drinking relative to drinking is almost as unhealthy as being obese, and not-drinking-wine relative to drinking wine is almost as unhealthy as smoking."
"A common use of Flickr is to find photos. But what about finding a new species of insect? Insect biosystematist Dr. Shaun Winterton discovered a photo on Flickr of a green lacewing taken by Hock Ping Guek (known as Kurt on Flickr). The insect was not identifiable as a known species to Winterton, and after collaborating with the photographer, a specimen was collected in the Malaysian rainforest. Further examination showed that this indeed was a new species. The discoverers named it Semachrysa jade. The discovery was published in ZooKeys and the abstract reads: A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy."
Awesome. And amazing to see this published in PLoS One.
"Scientists: If you get handed the keys to the Library of Wisdom, then choose to lock the place up and hand over the keys to Elsevier et. al., don't complain about the occult bookstore across the street."
Interesting project, but it's built on top of Mendeley. :-(
I generally want to never link to TED content, but the animation of DNA at around 3:30-4:00 minutes in is pretty awesome.
Very long, and very convincing, argument about why Brix are a crap measure of food quality.
I don't understand Minecraft well enough to understand this, but I still think it's cool.
Cool article on Joi. He also published an "unabridged" version on his blog.
"Two recent articles call for an openness revolution in science: one on GigaOM and the other in the Wall Street Journal. But they’ve got it all wrong. These folks are missing that the process of scientific discovery is not, at its core, an open process. It only becomes an open process at the point of publication."
The husband of Susan Silbey, my methods instructor and a brilliant mentor, passed away after a long battle with cancer.
Drugs may also let us fly around and shut lasers out of our fingertips!
I don't really see how this a new paradigm, but maybe that's just didn't because I didn't read the book yet.
"Science and reason are discomforting precisely because they have been carefully devised to allow nature to speak to us and to divulge its secrets, quite independently of what we would prefer to hear. Once we realize this, and we thus become willing to accept unpleasant but validated truths in place of comforting myths, we are far better prepared to recognize, address, and perchance solve, the myriad of problems presented to us by a complex civilization and a threatened natural estate. It is true that technology, applied without reasonable foresight or moral constraint, has brought us to our current environmental peril. But organized, cumulative and institutional reason - which is to say, science - is our best way out."
I only know about this because of XKCD, but it's still pretty awesome...
