Weekly Roundup!

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!