Our own Michele Banks provided the cover art for a mitochondria themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (B is for Biological Sciences). The Royal Society traces its roots back to 1660. Philosophical Transactions dates back to 1665 and the splitting into A and B dates to 1887
We could not be prouder of Michele for contributing to the merger of art with this long scientific tradition, nor could we be prouder of the Royal Society for showing excellent taste.
Squabbles broke out online this week over a report that female-named hurricanes have historically killed more people than male-named ones. The intrepid Ed Yong dove into the research behind the headlines on his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, and, uh…people reacted. Commenters commented. Twitterati tweeted. Clearly, this called for a lolcat.
This week, Science for The People is on the frontiers of medicine, from the fabulous to the foolhardy. They talk to Dr. Kevin Fong, co-director of the Centre for Aviation Space and Extreme Environment Medicine at University College London, about his book “Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century.” And they’re joined by Dr. Sydnee and Justin McElroy, hosts of the podcast “Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine.”
Ben Lillie, of well-justified The Story Collider fame, pointed us to a relatively new website – Call Me Ishmael. The idea is that you call (774.325.0503) and leave a voicemail talking about a book and how it connected with your life:
Leave a voicemail about a book you love and a story you’ve lived.
While “Ishmael” does, helpfully, provide a transcript of the call, it is the layers of emotion in the voice of the reviewer telling the story that really brings the reviews to life. This is probably not an accident.
And, in case you are wondering, I will not be calling in to leave a voicemail reviewing Valdez is Coming by Elmore Leonard, because I hate talking on the phone.
We here at The Finch & Pea are supporters of freedom, privacy, and the open exchange of ideas. We do our best to respect your privacy and the rights of those who produce creative content.
To those ends, we have, from the beginning published under Creative Commons licenses and have joined in advocacy to oppose government mass surveillance. Today, we are joining a multitude in the Reset the Net campaign to take steps to provide a secure Internet, because our governments will not act to respect our basic freedoms. As security expert Bruce Schneier has noted, organizations like the NSA have chosen to work to make the Internet less secure for all of us, in order to make it easier for them to attack those they perceive as threats.
As a WordPress.com hosted site, we cannot directly affect the addition of security features as recommended by the Reset the Net campaign. Fortunately, we don’t need to. Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com has announced that it will be implementing the Reset the Net recommendations by implementing SSL on all its subdomains. They have also created an easy to implement Internet Defense League widget you can put on your own WordPress.com site to help spread the word.
We would also encourage you to click the banner at the bottom of the page or the Reset the Net logo to get information about taking back your privacy and helping to make the Internet secure.
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