I’ve Got Your Missing Links Right Here (15 May 2016)

ByEd Yong
May 15, 2016
3 min read

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Top picks

From me at the Atlantic:

Megan Garber’s epic piece on the history, technology, and sociology of high heels has a superb line in virtually every paragraph. It’s utterly fascinating.

This piece on a (perhaps quixotic) quest to get someone to run a marathon in under 2hrs is full of gold nuggets. By Yannis Pitsiladis

“Leave it to the youngest person in the lab to think of the Big Idea.” Great story about some critical Zika experiments. By Pam Belluck.

I’ve been reading Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City and it’s incredible.

A repeatedly fascinating piece on post-mortem sperm donation by Jenny Morber.

Yes, the ongoing bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef is bad. But it isn’t dead or dying — yet. By Hannah Waters

The Computer Virus That Haunted Early AIDS Researchers. Kaveh Waddell on ransomware that was delivered by floppy disk.

A neuroscientist threatened to sue Jesse Singal when he asked about his side business selling brain tonics

John Oliver does p-hacking, bad science reporting, and oxytocin bullshit. It’s glorious

Computer gleans chemical insight from lab notebook failures

Science

Concerns About Folate Causing Autism Are Premature

The 17-year cicadas are emerging

What Hillary Clinton Says About Aliens Is Totally Misguided

Did a teen discover a lost Mayan city? Not exactly.

This lab is trying to get more ethnic minorities into research studies

Sign language gloves? Not quite

How dust from the Sahara fuels poisonous bacteria blooms in the Caribbean

Siddartha Mukherjee caught some serious flak for a New Yorker piece on epigenetics. Michael Eisen has a good explanation: “Any sufficiently convoluted explanation for biological phenomena is indistinguishable from epigenetics.”

How disease and public health efforts shaped fashion trends

“She has a particular fondness for Iapetus, exomoons, words, and champagne”. Congrats to Nadia Drake for winning this award.

Oh look, 1,284 new Kepler planets

Parasite turns Alaska king crabs into zombies

Elephants winning the war against drones.

Untrue Grit: Daniel Engber versus Angela Duckworth’s self-help-ish psychology book?

BBC’s David Attenborough app will offer over 1,000 clips free

Will Jasha McQueen’s fight for her frozen embryos threaten abortion rights?

The worst-case scenario in using genetically modified mosquitoes to fight Zika is that it won’t work

Does online tool overstate the risk of heart attack and stroke — and the need for statins?

Two countries read the same evidence base on e-cigarettes and come to radically different policies

Mount St. Helens Is Recharging Its Magma Stores, Setting Off Earthquake Swarms

 

Miscellaneous

Medieval re-enactor takes out drone with spear

This ‘smart typewriter‘ is supposed to free you from your computer

How Dogs Make Friends for Their Humans

What are the most common kinds of coincidences people experience?

Social networks as the seven deadly sins

“Hostile architecture” aims to keep unwanted – homeless, skaters, teens, junkies – from using urban space

On Facebook’s unprecedented cultural power

How Rival Gardens of Eden in Iraq Survived ISIS, Dwindling Tourists, And Each Other

US Army fact-checks fan theory about how much back pay Captain America is due

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