Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Large Hadron Collider – the incredible machinery that was credited with discovering the Holy Grail of long sought after particles, the Higgs Boson – has finally been re-awoken after a two year slumber whilst undergoing upgrades and repairs. Naturally this incredible piece of technology, with the ability to change our understanding of our universe as we know it, was due a…
Entry Text What doctors at Washington, D.C. hospitals discovered inside a 62-year-old patient looks like a giant egg, and parts of it had a “firm and rubbery” texture similar to a hard-boiled egg. But this was no egg.It’s called a peritoneal loose body, and according to one of the doctors that had it surgically removed,…
google_ad_section_start A memorial outside the Tulane University School of Law on February 2, 2015. Student Sara LaMont was allegedly shot … Late last November, as Tulane’s campus was winding down for Thanksgiving break, University President Michael Fitts sat on an airplane, reading through a sheaf of documents. In his hectic first year on the job,…
SHARING BUTTONS CONTENT OF THE POST GhostofAlyeska says he was “simply curious who Fox News’ science reporters are. I wanted to know what kind of scientific backgrounds they might have.” Here’s what he found: NPR’s science correspondents include: Shankar Vedantam, who has been honored by the American Public Health Association, is the author of The…
Photo Houseboats are dwarfed by the steep banks of Lake Don Pedro in La Grange, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown ordered mandatory water restrictions on Wednesday to deal with the drought. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Video close media-action-overlay California’s Extreme Drought, Explained The state is experiencing the worst drought in its history. Find out just how…
Meet your next fire extinguisher. Photo: George Mason University George Mason University engineering students Seth Robertson and Viet Tran encountered plenty of doubters when they settled on an idea for their senior project. Even the typically experimental thinkers of academia thought a fire extinguisher that puts out flames with sound waves was outrageous. And in…
Today in Tedium: Not many light bulbs can say that they’ve managed to survive two World Wars and then some, but the fire department in Livermore, California has managed to keep a life of its own far beyond many of the firefighters that have stayed on call over the past 114 years. The bulb, which the…
Claims that climate science is a hoax, that human action is not a factor: these are not just positions in a normal debate. They are ways of saying — saying to the press — hey, the evidence doesn’t matter. In October of last year, the New York Times ran an in-house interview with its own…
Religious leaders, who are all, “I don’t want the Affordable Care Act and its free birth control pills to ruin my church-going ladies”: you’re in for a rude awakening. Because (some of) those ladies are like, fuck yes, give me the free pills. Via The Atlantic: But what about religiously-affiliated women? Where were their voices…
Depression hurts. So does sexism. Photograph: Adam G Gregor/Alamy Sexism is certainly nauseating – the disgusting leers on the street, the discrimination, the violence. But those everyday expressions of misogyny could be seriously impacting our mental health as well. A study published this month in the journal Sex Roles reveals that some of the sexism…