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| A collection of illegally trafficked parrots confiscated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Forensics Lab. www.nytimes.com |
Welcome to Weekly Roundup, a new feature here at AmericanScience! Each Monday, we'll bring you a few of our favorite science-related news stories of the past week to help you start the week off right. This week:
Bill Gates' vision of "Big History": a grand narrative that
starts with the Big Bang and ends in the Future, in only ten lessons. Coming
soon to a high school curriculum near you!
As historians, we are familiar with the neglect of women in
clinical research. But scientists are now realizing gender matters for pre-clinical research too.
After all of the excellent work on the politics of the HeLa cell line, it is
interesting to think that a cell line's human identity might extend all the way
into the lab...
Detailed write-up of the finding of gross
negligence on the part of BP and co-defendants, in Bloomberg. Can the
spill be at once the result of gross negligence and a normal accident?
Why do devices for measuring lung
capacity have a setting to adjust for the race of the patient?
The New Republic recently
republished a Malcolm Gladwell article from the mid-1990s about
apocalyptic virus hysteria (Outbreak, The Hot Zone, etc).
Thoughtful and interesting piece (Evan swears!), though occasional
glibness about environmental issues shows the difference between the view from
1995 and 2014.
MoMA made headlines a few years back
when it announced that it would start acquiring video games. Adding another layer
to this recent push for software and game preservation is a kickstarter
campaign to create a video game sound archive and documentary about
the composers who created game soundtracks.
The New York Times reports on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Forensics Lab, the world's only wildlife crime lab and a modern-day wunderkammer (click the link for more amazing photos!)
A round-up of some research arguing
that automation has a dangerous effect on the attention of pilots,
suggesting some interesting implications for automation and design in settings
in which safety is a concern.
An outstanding interactive visualization of the
multiple and shifting human-computer relationships that safely brought the
Apollo lander onto the surface of the Moon. Digital humanities FTW.
Happy reading!
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