In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Physical Science. A lever of the first class. From Flickr, by zaxl4
Life Science. Rhopalaea Crassa, a fluorescent colored sea squirt. From Flickr, by CybersamX
Reader comments of the week:
The purported first pictures of a wild okapi in almost 50 years made big news last week, with most of the Life Science blogs covering it and the ScienceBlogs staff making it the the Buzz for September 13th. However, In Okapi: More lies than Sarah Palin!!! Greg Laden set out to correct some of the misinformation about the story he thought was being propagated by the other blogs. First picture of an okapi? Not so much. Thought science believed they were extinct? Also a fail. To support his claims, Laden mentions that he ate okapi once, which sent the imaginations of the readers spinning.
Reader Phil asked:
And what did it taste like? Hopefully not chicken. Venisony perhaps?
While reader Jonathan Vos Post tried to one-up Greg with:
Anyone here besides me ever eat Mammoth meat? Frozen for a long time. Thawed. At the Explorers Club in New York City, maybe 30 years ago. From Siberia. Gamey. Chewey.
Over at the Physical Science channel, the big news of the week was the activation of the beam in the Large Hadron Collider. And, of course, the news that we weren't all killed in the process. Jake Young of Pure Pedantry asked Has the LHC destroyed the world?. He provided a useful website to use if you want to check. Spoiler alert! The world was not destroyed.
Which was good news for Jake's reader Zeno, but bad news for his students:
My students asked me today if they still have to study for tomorrow's math exam, seeing as the world could end at any moment. I told them the world will certainly end if they don't.
While Jake was making sure reality had not been destroyed, Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera told her readers Don't wait for the LHC - get your Higgs boson now, and linked to the cutest, nerdiest beanie babies ever. Looks like geek Christmas came early.
Some other Life Science posts we thought were cool this week were:
Gotta love those gracile tyrannosaurid
One of so many bizarre Triassic marine reptiles
Linkage and the Antibiotic Resistance Problem
Asymmetrical brains help fish (and us) to multi-task
Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?
And from the Physical Science channel:
What Ike Really Means; Introducing Integrated Kinetic Energy
A Simple Winning Strategy for the Card Game War
Rappin' About the CERN's Large Hadron Supercollider
Look for highlights from other channels coming up!
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