Sad Sacks

Week in Review / By Evan Lerner / November 6, 2009

Our take on the week: As a UK adviser is fired over politically unpalatable advice, and an English teacher is suspended over an article about animal sexuality, the fate of facts is on the line.

Slideshow

A Miniature Miscellany

Felice Frankel and George Whitesides’ new book probes the barely visible.

Research Blogging

Sweet Obesity

Do artificial sweeteners help or hinder a healthy diet?

Research Blogging

Dave Munger

Saturn’s Strange Children

New findings reveal we still have much to learn about Saturn's moons.

Reviews

A Man on the Edge

A new biography explores the colorful life of Jacques Cousteau.

Departments

World

Pushing a Power Portfolio

ARPA-E rolls out and a nuclear debate rages.

Innovation

Lo and Behold: the Internet

How a 20-minute meeting led to the internet.

Ideas

Overhyped Placebos of Doom?

Unpacking the assumptions behind the placebo effect.

World

The Environmental Revival

Which modern enviro concepts are throwbacks to the past?

World

A Natural Obsession

Why organic foods won’t help efforts to create sustainable agriculture.

World

Brains and Storms

Animal brains and Superfreakonomics.

Ideas

A Writing Revolution

Are you published yet? Professors plot the global shift in authorship.

Ideas

Up the Cosmic Distance Ladder

How do we measure the distances to planets, stars, and galaxies?

World

Back From the Future

Time-travelling particles and the perils of the cloud.

Culture

At the Edge of Perception

Luke Jerram explores the boundaries of science and art.

Culture

Awkward Beauty

The complicated relationship between science and art.

Culture

Luke Jerram: Objectively Inspired

Slideshow: The stunning portfolio of an enigmatic artist.

Ideas

Evolved for Extinction?

The more adapted a species is, the greater its risk of extinction may be.

Books

Catching the Wind in Rural Malawi

William Kamkwamba on how to power a village.

Ideas

Folding Our Way to a Revolution

How DNA origami is remaking nanotech.

Slideshow

Traveling Through Time and Stars

In Far Out, stunning astronomical images and lyrical essays on the nature of light and space explore the universe’s past.

Books

Books to Read Now

November releases feature the mysteries of Grigori Perelman, the evolutionary origins of reading, and strategies for containing strains of flu.

Interactive

Our Shifting Urban Landscape

Urban ecologist James Danoff-Burg takes us into the field to demonstrate the tools of analyzing the biodiversity of human-altered ecosystems.

Seed's Daily Zeitgeist

November 7, 2009

  1. 1 The ultimate experiment in financial forecasting

    The Arxiv Blog

    Swiss econophysicist Didier Sornette has had some surprising success predicting market bubbles--but now, to test if his forecasts are truly bona fide, he's sealing them in an electronic envelope and entrusting them to the arXiv, to be opened next May.

  2. 2 Threatened by fault lines, Iranian capital to be moved

    Highly Allochthonous

    When geology meets policy, the results can be radical. Iran has rubber-stamped plans to move the nation's capital to a brand new or existing city in an area less threatened by deadly quakes, as Tehran, the current capital, sits at a nexus of faults: Chris Rowan of Highly Allochthonous lays out the tectonic map for readers and muses on whether a stringent quake code might be more effective.

  3. 3 Brain disease stopped in its tracks

    ScienceNow

    Experts say a landmark study is the most promising stride in years for gene therapy, the practice of treating genetic disease with biotechnology. Scientists have halted the progress of a degenerative brain disease in two seven-year-old boys, adding genes for missing proteins into their cells with a modified virus.

  4. 4 Why smart people get a simple question wrong

    Via Cosmic Variance

    Anne is looking at George, but Jack is looking at Anne. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? The latest Scientific American logic puzzle is harder than you think.

  5. 5 'How a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia'

    Boston Review

    Andrew Lih, who joined Wikipedia in its infancy, has written the first popular history of the internet phenomenon. But, says one reviewer, he may be as in the dark as everyone else as to why Wikipedia, a mysterious synergy of nerdiness and philosophy, works.

ScienceBlogs.com

Selected Posts for November 7, 2009

  1. The rifting of Africa

    Eruptions

    November 5, 2009

  2. This Is Depressing

    Corpus Callosum

    November 5, 2009

  3. Earthquake hazard mitigation the Iranian way

    Highly Allochthonous

    November 5, 2009

  4. Dark Energy: Hard to Kill (Part 1)

    Starts With a Bang

    November 4, 2009

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