Links: Mammoths, Profanity, and GMOs

Good morning!

Let's start off with a plug: the MIT History, Anthropology, and STS Program (HASTS) has a Twitter account run by a different member of the community each week, on the model of @sweden. It's called @HASTS_MIT and for the next seven days, David Singerman is up.  Check out what he has to tweet!

Jeremy Greene, Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, discusses the rising cost of generic medicines in Slate.

The case against mammoth cloning.

The "Internet of Things" is the purported next wave of the internet in which our technologies -- everything from coffee makers to thermostats to production lines -- will be connected by sensors and wifi networks. Sue Halpern explains. (See also a couple recent thing-y posts right here.)

McConaughey: the dude really is everywhere.
http://sciencefriday.com/blogs/11/21/2014/truth-educated-guesses-and-speculations-in-interstellar.html 

In 2006, Caltech string theorist Kip Thorne organized a workshop for his fellow physicists with the aim of writing a science fiction movie that "got things right." Eight years later, we have Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, a film that (by many accounts) gets the science "laughably wrong." Thorne is sticking by the film, however: you can read an except of his 300 page book The Science of Interstellar here. Or, if you prefer, you can watch Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the end of the movie instead.

One of those fake spam academic journals accepted and "peer reviewed" a paper that consists entirely of profanity.

The new president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has eliminated the position of Chief Scientific Adviser. Greenpeace and other environmental groups urged that the post be cut in an open letter this past June, in response to comments by outgoing science adviser Anne Glover citing a scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs. "Score one for the Luddites," says Michael Specter. (Kirkpatrick Sale would presumably happily agree.)