Influencer Ed Yong - featured
Ed Yong (@edyong209)
Bio: Science writer, freelance journalist, geek, husband, creator of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I cover the wow beat. http://t.co/cQA5wHV3
Location: London, UK
Mojo: 598
Franz Kafka Was a Great Procrastinator
Slate Magazine
4 mentions — 3 weeks ago
featured |
So far, this series has made artists sound awfully industrious. They get up at 4 a.m., skip meals, and take amphetamines to extend their productive hours. Even the nap-lovers turn out to be workaholics. It reminds me of a quote by V. S. Pritchett, from an essay about ...
Mind-Bending Parasite Permanently Quells Cat Fear in Mice
Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science
9 mentions — 3 weeks ago
featured |
A mouse sniffs the air, catches the whiff of cat urine, and runs towards the source of the smell… and straight into the jaws of a cat. This bizarre suicidal streak is the work of a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which has commandeered the mouse’s brain and ...
What leeches and ligers can teach you about evolution
Boing Boing
7 mentions — 4 weeks ago
featured |
This is the first story in a four-part, weekly series on taxonomy and speciation. It's meant to help you as you participate in Armchair Taxonomist — a challenge from the Encyclopedia of Life to bring scientific descriptions of animals, plants, and other living things out from behind paywalls ...
Cheater Cheater Mucus Eater: Simple Mechanisms Drive Cleaner Wrasses To Cooperate
Science Sushi
3 mentions — 4 weeks ago
featured |
Labroides dimidiatus feeding off a plexiglas plate in the lab at the Lizard Island Research Station. Photo courtesy of Simon GinginsOn the surface, cleaner wrasses seem like real nice fish. They set up their little cleaning stations on patches of reef, offering to eat any external parasites that ...
Modeling Scouts Are Recruiting Teenage Patients at Anorexia Clinics
slate.com
6 mentions — 4 weeks ago
featured |
MySlate is a new tool that lets you track your favorite parts of Slate. You can follow authors and sections, track comment threads you're interested in, and more.Modeling scouts have been gathering outside of Sweden’s largest eating disorder clinic, trying to lure critically thin patients onto the runway.Let ...
The Everyday Sexism Project: a year of shouting back
The Guardian
4 mentions — 1 month ago
featured |
A 14-year-old schoolgirl wrote: ' am constantly told I can’t be good at things because I’m a girl.' Photograph: Thomas Grass/Getty ImagesWhen I started the Everyday Sexism Project a year ago, I never imagined that by now it would have attracted some 25,000 entries and be about to ...
Magic trick transforms conservatives into liberals
Nature News & Comment
5 mentions — 1 month ago
featured |
When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are ...
Genetics: A gene of rare effect
Nature News & Comment
4 mentions — 1 month ago
featured |
A mutation that gives people rock-bottom cholesterol levels has led geneticists to what could be the next blockbuster heart drug.When Sharlayne Tracy showed up at the clinical suite in the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas last January, the bandage wrapped around her left wrist ...
Ignorance, Explainers, and Knowing What We Don’t Know
This View of Life
3 mentions — 2 months ago
featured |
One of the most interesting parts of being a knowledge omnivore is discovering a blind spot. You can be pursuing some obscure technology that existed for 5 years at the turn of the century and suddenly you stumble on Omnipresent Bit of Modern Life That You Do Not ...
Gene therapy cures leukaemia in eight days
New Scientist
3 mentions — 2 months ago
featured |
The audacious norovirus has a range of amazing abilites that allow it to spread like wildfire.Yet its inner workings still elude usA new class of malaria drug kills parasites in human blood, in the liver and in mosquitoes, preventing further transmissionTwenty-four US military personnel deployed to the Fukushima ...
Secret Lives of Wild Animals Captured by 1 Million Camera-Trap Images
wired.com
2 mentions — 3 months ago
featured |
Thanks to motion-triggered digital camera traps, scientists have a powerful tool for studying reclusive animals in remote, inaccessible areas -- and also for generating animated .gifs of gorillas scratching their stomachs. Okay, perpetually looping scratching gorillas aren't the point of camera-trap research. But they're a very fun byproduct,
When Experts Go Blind
Phenomena: Only Human
4 mentions — 4 months ago
featured |
The picture above is an X-ray computed tomography (CT) scan of a human lung. Go ahead and take a few seconds to look at it carefully.The image takes a starring role in a fun study in press at Psychological Science. Trafton Drew and colleagues at the Brigham and ...
Work resumes on lethal flu strains
Nature News & Comment
3 mentions — 4 months ago
featured |
A moratorium on research that modifies the potential virulence of avian influenza virus has now been lifted.An international group of scientists this week ended a year-long moratorium on controversial work to engineer potentially deadly strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus in the lab.Researchers agreed to temporarily halt ...
Robotic arm 'mind control' hailed
BBC News
6 mentions — 5 months ago
Unrivalled control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralysed woman's thoughts, a US study says.Jan, who is 53 and paralysed from the neck down, was able to deftly pick up, move and place a variety of objects in a manner similar to a normal arm.Brain ...