Charles Darwin | AmericanScience

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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.

Making & Knowing Project via Chemical & Engineering News

Science & technology writer Amanda Schaffer has been busy! First, she critiqued the prevalence of the great-man view of innovation in the tech industry in MIT technology review. Now, she’s published a three-part series on how the religious opposition of Jehovah’s Witnesses to blood transfusions has helped inspire a more conservative approach to the use of blood in surgery (and new high-tech, high-skills surgical techniques).
Historians of science in the (chemical) news! The intrepid experimental replicators of Columbia University’s Making and Knowing project were featured in a profile in Chemical & Engineering News.
Zeynep Tufekci explains why smart devices may be a dumb idea, when it comes to security and public safety.
The strange history of scientists who eat their research subjects.
A paper with 5,184 authors: big science, “kilo-authorship,” and the shifting taxonomy of scientific credit.
Ever wonder what a Song Sparrow sounded like in 1929? Well, wonder no more: Cornell’s archive of natural sounds, the world’s largest, is now live.
Political theorist Jedediah Purdy looks at the darker side of American environmentalism in the twentieth century.
The British Library wants help cracking the code on a 13th-century sword.
Amazon, it turns out, monitors and patrols its own employees’ behavior just as ruthlessly as it does your shopping habits. Jeff Bezos says that’s not his company.

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