Links for your Thanksgiving airport travel

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A tardigrade. Cute, isn’t it? (via sciencealert.com)

The ecology of wild turkeys in urban New England.
A psychoactive online dictionary.
Hooray! The Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia is rebounding from its bankruptcy filing.
An amazing idea for a study: stick publish-or-perish scientists in fMRI machines and measure their reactions to the impact factors of potential journals.
How getting a PhD in poli sci at MIT helped Tom Wolf become governor of Pennsylvania.
The BBC catches Volkswagens on film cheating European emissions tests.
From Nautilus, using Facebook to find extinct human species. (FYI the extinct humans are not themselves on Facebook.)
On the anniversary of general relativity, the story of its most important and strangest textbook.
Steven Shapin reviews Michael Gordin in the LRB (paywall).
Cyborg electricity-generating plants?
And sequencing the bizarre genome of the bizarre creature called the tardigrade.

Return of the Sextants: Guest Post

Today we’re featuring a guest post from Sarah Pickman, a PhD student in the History Dept. at Yale. Sarah works on the history of exploration, field collecting, and natural history museums, and anthropology in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her past work has focused on the material culture of expeditions, from field provisions to Polar gear. Sarah comes to Yale from New York, where she earned an M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture at Bard College.

Any casual observer can see that there’s a certain vogue for retro technology in the air. So dust off your home canning system, pull out your vinyl records, and break out your…sextant?

Double-bridge sextant, c. 1798. Collection of National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, NAV1107

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Links for Monday, November 16, 2015

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Everybody go right now and support the effort to make a LEGO kit of the HMS Beagle. (But why does the creator’s Flickr photo set include a Jemmy Button figure, but not the official LEGO Ideas site?)
In related news, the evolutionary success of smallness, and Rebecca Higgitt argues that Newton’s Principia is more influential than Darwin’s Origin. Fight!
In praise of virtual classes: “Human brains have evolved with a flitting, fleeting ability to maintain focus on any one thing.”
This article from Nautilus has won the AAAS’s Kavli Award for Science Journalism.
The graph isomorphism problem is no longer a problem.
“When there are incidents, trains are located by deduction.” That and other devastating lines can be found in this fantastic Atlantic investigation of the challenges of the large technological system/gigantic computer more commonly known as the New York subway.
CRISPR and the dream of genetic manipulation, version 3.
Former American Science blogger Lee Vinsel’s 95 theses on innovation.
Astronomers have found a dwarf planet in the Solar system, more than 100 AUs away.
And the many historical uses of beards.

Transparent aluminum! And other weekly links for Wednesday, November 11, 2015

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What the winner of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences gets, plus a lot of money

Secret laboratories, destroyed samples, doctored tests: the World Anti-Doping Agency’s report on Russian athletics is so, so juicy.
Relativity vs. quantum mechanics, round N+1. Also, here’s MIT’s Dave Kaiser on the politics of general relativity.
Former American Science Blogger Henry Cowles is co-editor of a Focus section in the latest Isis on “Bounded Rationality and the History of Science.”
Cool maps of the series of tubes that make up the Internet.
Before Kurt Vonnegut was Kurt Vonnegut, he worked for General Electric.
Revenge of the nerds: scientific celebrity financed by tech billionaires.
Helen Macdonald on mushrooms, particularly the legendary Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science annual Fungus Hunt.
And all you Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home fans (for non-fans, that’s the one where the crew has to save the whales) will be excited that transparent aluminum is now a real thing.

Links for Tuesday, November 3, 2015

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Curiosity selfie (NASA)

In case you missed these from the past week:

We’re featured on Public History Commons!
A new paper in Science and Engineering Ethics questions the widespread use of “publication consultants” at every level of research, especially in biology and medicine, and suggests that their use should be made more transparent.
Greenland is melting away, and the New York Times has a wonderful (and beautifully designed) account of Earth science in action.
If there are aliens, they’re probably robots by now.
Giant ancient earthworks in Kazakhstan have only been discovered with NASA’s help.
Theranos, a company that has raised $9 billion on a promise to revolutionize blood testing, is coming under fire for its central claim: that it can produce results using only a pinprick’s worth of blood. “While hot Silicon Valley start-ups like Uber and Airbnb have run into regulatory hurdles, as a medical technology company, Theranos has bumped up against something else: the scientific method.”
Quantum mechanics v. relativity.
Microbiomes? The Times is on that too this week. Here’s a feature on the American Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit called “The Secret World Inside You.” And here’s the writeup of two new papers in Science and Nature, urging a national microbiome research initiative.