Sugar makes rats stupid, and apparently studies about sugar render people unable to handle embargoes properly. A message today, about a Journal of Physiology study about how sugar affects learning in rats, from UCLA media relations staffer Elaine Schmidt: I hope you’ll forgive the late notice and group pitch.  Despite two months of patiently explaining to the senior production editor how a journal embargo drives news coverage, he refused to give me accurate advance notice of the article’s publ...  show all text

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Sample of subway network structures from (clockwise, top left) Shanghai, Madrid, Moscow, Tokyo, Seoul and Barcelona. Image: Roth et al./JRSI After decades of urban evolution, the world’s major subway systems appear to be converging on an ideal form. On the surface, these core-and-branch systems — evident in New York City, Tokyo, London or most any large metropolitan subway — may seem intuitively optimal. But in the absence of top-down central planning, their movement over decades toward a common  show all text

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I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies. So, the challenge: ...  show all text

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Erin Podolak (blog, Twitter) was interviewed at The SA Incubator a few weeks ago. Then she decided to turn the tables on me and interview me ...

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Former News International chief executive, her husband and four others to be charged in phone-hacking inquiry Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, is to be charged with perverting the course of justice, the Crown Prosecution Service said on Tuesday. She faces three charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice including the alleged removal of seven cases of material from the archive of News International and the alleged concealment of documents and computers  show all text

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Scientists plan to deliver a coffin to Downing Street on Tuesday to protest about "the death of British science".

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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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Over the years, I have taught my copy of Microsoft Word a lot of neuroscience terminology: amygdala, corpus callosum, dendritic spines, voxel. But it always knew ...

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The Floppy Disk Icon means "save" for a whole generation of people who have never seen one. — Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 9, 2012 What happens when all the things we based are icons on don't exist anymore? Do they just become, ahem, iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery? Floppy Disk - Save Save? Save where? You know, down there. Adding the Arrow to the 3.5" floppy makes me smile. Is it pointing to under my desk? What's a floppy? Why not a USB key? Maybe a cloud icon? That wi...  show all text

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This week on Science Weekly, Claudia Hammond discusses how we perceive the passage of time, the subject of her new book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. From body temperature to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Claudia reveals how our calculation of time can be affected by a range of physical and mental conditions. Ahead of the Festival of Ideas in the UK, Alok Jha is joined by two fans of science geekdom, Mark Henderson author of The Geek Manifesto: Why ...  show all text

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It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books.

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Here's a series of play sets that won't be debuting in the toy aisle anytime soon. Sculptor Mihai Mihu has built this fantastic and creepy nine-part collection of LEGO dioramas based on Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Witness the Divine Comedy depicted in tiny plastic bricks, from the River Styx to the frozen head of Satan. More »

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[Re-posted from last night.] Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays a...  show all text

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“I am honored to be doing this cover. It’s a celebratory moment for our country, and that’s what I tried to capture. (I don’t especially like those rainbow colors, but they are what they are—I had to use them.) I wanted to celebrate the bravery of the President’s statement—a statement long overdue—but all the more appreciated in this political year. We are on the right side of history.” —Bob Staake, the artist who created “Spectrum of Light,” the cover of next week’s issue.

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New Scientist visits Death Valley to find out how human geologists read Earth's past in its present – and how the rover Curiosity will apply those tricks

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If Canada exploits the oil in its tar sands, civilization will be at risk.

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From Yahoo! News: President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

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FACT: Last time North Carolina amended their constitution on marriage it was to ban interracial marriage http://t.co/fck5EWRn

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Gay rights laws in America have evolved to allow — but in some cases ban — rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people on a range of issues, including marriage, hospital visitation, adoption…

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Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain . . .

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Are you annoyed by all those automatic Facebook news apps? Apparently you're not alone. They're falling off a cliff right now. The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication. If you decide to click on a link it doesn't ...  show all text

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On both sides of the Atlantic, the social ties that bind our political, legal and corporate forces lie exposed Shortly after Mitt Romney's failed 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination his son Tagg set up a private equity fund with the campaign's top fundraiser. One of the first donors was his mum, Anne. Next came several of his dad's financial backers. Tagg had no experience in the world of finance, but after two years in the middle of a deep recession the company had netted $244m from ju...  show all text

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Firm has 'no plans' to work with thinktank following campaign comparing people concerned about climate to mass murderers Diageo, one of the world's largest drinks companies, has announced it will no longer fund the Heartland Institute, a rightwing US thinktank which briefly ran a billboard campaign this week comparing people concerned about climate change to mass murderers and terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski. On Thursday, a billboard appeared over the Eisenh...  show all text

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In just six years, Twitter has become the life-support system for those seeking news, humour, wisdom or a shot of esoteric web weirdness. Here, introduced by Lauren Laverne, 50 top tweeters reveal their three favourite follows. Plus, five experts on the Twitter accounts that define their fields The internet is like a talking bear: undoubtedly miraculous but best approached with caution. This has never been truer than in the case of the time-thief Twitter. In the six years since its inception, t...  show all text

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A growing phenomenon in the world is the distrust of science as a valid way to view the world. It is caused by a number of factors, including religious affiliation, political conservatism, lack of a sound education, and fear. And it is particularly bad in the USA, and driven by the conservative movement in their political sphere, by people such as Sarah Palin, and in the religious sphere by people like Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis. Between 1974 and 2010 the number of conservatives who say th...  show all text

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You don’t have to hang around the internet for long to recognise the “silo” phenomena. The way the ideological group-thinkers will hang around specific sites feeding their belief. Then there is the “echo-chamber” – the way that bloggers and commenters in ideological silos will frantically circulate links and claims from ideologically approved sources for use by their ideological comrades. It all seems to foster the illusion of a community which knows the Truth. Tame “experts” are elevated to sa...  show all text

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All 50 reactors now closed for maintenance after 2011 tsunami but government faces major public opposition to reactivation Japan is shutting down its last working nuclear reactor as part of the safety drive imposed after the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant. The closure of the third reactor at the Tomari plant in Hokkaido prefecture, northern Japan, means all of the country's 50 nuclear reactors have been taken offline, leaving the country with no nuclear-derived e...  show all text

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